The Bauhaus was created in 1919 by the unification of two older academies in Weimar, and in its founding manifesto Walter Gropius (1883-1969) demanded the unification of all the arts under the primacy of architecture. The teaching of photography went through three main phases until the Bauhaus's dissolution in 1933.
The period until 1923 was dominated by the arts-and-crafts ethos of individual craftsmanship. Photography featured in the preliminary courses developed by Johannes Itten and his assistant Georg Muche, but primarily, although some formal experimentation took place, as a reproductive medium. Some early Bauhaus students, like Umbo, became photographers, but there is no significant link between this phase of the Bauhaus's history and the development of avant-garde photography. When László Moholy-Nagy joined the faculty in 1923, the emphasis on mass production and industrial design increased, with the sale of Bauhaus work providing a source of income. Lucia Moholy's advertising photographs successfully contributed to this, and she also recorded the school's new buildings and workshops when it moved to Dessau in 1926. Moholy-Nagy incorporated photography in his compulsory preliminary courses, so that for the first time all students received some photographic training; and some were influenced by his experimental work. Although, as yet, no free-standing photography class existed, the images produced at this time (e.g. the work of Irene Bayer-Hecht (1898-1991), Florence Henri, Erich Consemueller, and others) are among the best in the Bauhaus's history. After the departure of Moholy-Nagy and his wife in 1928, Joost Schmidt taught advertising and gave some introductory classes in photography. Then in 1929 he appointed Walter Peterhans as the first (and only) teacher of a photography class at the Bauhaus. Although his own work was strongly influenced by Neue Sachlichkeit, Peterhans designed a course in technique and materials that did not privilege any particular style, and from which graphic designers like Irene and Herbert Schuermann or Kurt Kranz benefited as much as photojournalists like Irena Bluehova (1904-91) or Moshe Raviv-Vorobeichic.
However, by comparison with schools like the Folkwang Institute in Essen under Max Burchartz (1887-1961), the Stuttgart School of Graphic Arts under Ernst Schneidler, and Hans Finsler's school at Burg Giebichenstein, which offered the only curriculum in ‘modern photography’ worthy of the name, the Bauhaus was of secondary importance. Notwithstanding the many experiments in photography and photomontage that took place there, and the oeuvre of László Moholy-Nagy, as a school it was less influential in this field than in industrial design, art theory, and basic pedagogics.
— Rolf Sachsse
Bibliography
- Fiedler, J. (ed.), Photography at the Bauhaus (1990).
- Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Fotografie am Bauhaus (1990)
