[Stairwell in a Master's House, Bauhaus Dessau]

From the landing of this sleek staircase, Lucia Moholy frames a formal study in light and line. To depict designs by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius at the school’s new campus in Dessau, she opted for a cool, objective approach, eschewing the perspectival play then popular among her peers. The rigor of her composition suits the space; apprehending the stair on its axis, she holds its diagonal banisters in tacit balance. And, at the risk of overexposure, she captures the building's radical transparency; in upper and lower registers, daylight floods through Gropius’s signature pane-glass walls, alighting on other favorite materials: burnished steel, chrome, plaster, and concrete. Moholy’s restraint reflects that of the structure itself, where forms, refined to their essential function, seem to exceed the sum of their parts.


In the mid-1920s, photography's status at the Bauhaus remained uncertain. Despite efforts by Moholy and her then-husband, László Moholy-Nagy, to foster new experiments with the camera, no photographic course was established there until 1929, two years after her departure. Without a workshop of her own, Moholy served as the community’s de facto photographer, helping to shape the public identity of the Bauhaus and disseminate its vision. This print, produced for the Berlin image bank of art historian Franz Stoedtner, reflects the contemporary circulation of her work.


Widely reproduced—yet rarely attributed—in books and exhibitions, Moholy’s Bauhaus photographs became a subject of dispute in the years following the school’s closure. When, in 1933, Moholy was forced to flee Germany, she was unable to transport her trove of glass negatives. For years, she believed these negatives to have been destroyed by Allied bombardment. Only in the 1950s did she learn that Gropius had taken custody of them during the war, for use in publications of his architectural work—publications that neglected to credit Moholy or acknowledge her aesthetic contributions behind the camera. Cut off from this material during her exile in London, Moholy struggled to re-establish herself as a professional photographer or promote her past efforts. “While other former members of the Bauhaus built their continued success on what pictorial records they had or could get ahold of, I was debarred from making such use, and indeed any use, of my own photographs,” she reflected in 1955. Only with legal action did she manage to recover this scattered archive of images. She devoted much of her subsequent career scholarship on photographic art and history, and even envisioned a museum on the subject—attuned, perhaps, to the many possible ways the medium’s stories might be mistold.