"Photography is Light Design:" Photographic Experimentation in bauhaus

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

In the early years of bauhaus’s publication life (Bauhaus Journal of Design), namely from 1926 to 1928, as Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and many other contributors left the Bauhaus State School in 1928 to explore other opportunities as they came under increased scrutiny and fiscal undermining as theNazi party took root in postwar Deutschland, the bauhaus’s conscious disregard of publishing guidelines and even German grammar rules, in addition to its bold design, created a lasting aesthetic, in the face of opposition, that signifies modernity at Gropius’s intersection of the artist and craftsman, where the “artist is an exalted craftsman.” The content and form of bauhaus anticipated today’s filmic and photocentric society—a society where, as László Moholy-Nagy predicted, “the illiterate of the future will not be one who cannot write but who does not know photography.” While there are a number of little magazines that make compelling use of photographs, like Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau or even Duchamp and Man Ray’s New York Dada, this article concentrates critical considerations to the bauhaus to answer the following: How do the changes to the technology of photography alter what a magazine can do? And specifically, how is bauhaus an object of experimentation? Dubbed the “New Vision” by Moholy-Nagy, aspects of the new aesthetic began to be featured in magazines, camera annuals, and exhibitions. Moholy-Nagy argued that “new discoveries could not be confined to the mentality of bygone periods” because such an approach arrests all productive activity, a hundred-year arrest that yielded little results except in the science and journalism where photography proved significant, but unconcerned with whether it was called art or not. Moholy-Nagy’s thoughts on photography represent a new era of photography and help define photography’s function in little magazines.