Bauhaus
Bauhaus photography uses modern design principles—clean forms, strong angles, and experimental viewpoints—to depict everyday objects, people, and buildings.
In photographic discourse, Bauhaus denotes the cluster of practices, experiments, and teachings that grew out of the Bauhaus school in Germany. Literally meaning "house for building," the Bauhaus pursued a total work of art that dissolved boundaries between fine art and applied design, aiming to link artistic practice with everyday life. Within this context, photography emerged first as a practical tool for documenting workshops, products, and architecture during the Weimar years, then as an autonomous field of experimentation in the later Dessau and Berlin phases. Figures such as László Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy helped shift photography from mere documentation toward a medium central to the school's ambition to unite form, function, and technology and to articulate a new, rational visual culture.
Aesthetically, Bauhaus photography is associated with the New Vision, which sought to redefine perception through unconventional perspectives, abstraction, and attention to underlying structures. Practitioners explored extreme viewpoints, radical cropping, strong contrasts of light and shadow, multiple exposures, and negative prints to reveal hidden geometries in objects and urban space. Photograms and photomontage became key experimental methods, while rigorous attention to optics, lighting, texture, and surface characterized more technically focused work. Typical subjects included the school's own buildings, products, and residents, as well as advertising still lifes and architectural views, treated both as functional images and as opportunities for formal investigation.
Debate surrounds the idea of a single "Bauhaus photographic style," which many historians consider misleading given the variety of approaches present. It is often more precise to speak of photography in the Bauhaus, intersecting with New Objectivity's emphasis on the formal beauty of objects, Constructivist ideas about socially responsible visual language, and overlaps with Surrealism, Dada, documentary practice, and New Typography. The later New Bauhaus in Chicago extended these concerns, influencing subsequent strands of documentary and conceptual photography while keeping alive the school's experimental, technologically engaged attitude to the medium.