Author Description

These five hundred photographs are a unique and exuberant record of Bauhaus activities and experiments during the 1920s and early 1930s. Significantly, most of the photographs were taken by artists-painters like Fritz Kuhr and Werner Siedhoff, designers Heinz Loew and Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus masters Hannes Meyer and Joosst Schmidt - who were not self-conscious photographers but who wanted to work with a new technological product. The results constitute the largest and most comprehensive photographic archive currently available on the Bauhaus, supplementing visual material already published in Hans Wingler's monumental Bauhaus and presenting the school's more human side. Some of these photographs have never been published, while others have not been published since the period in which they were made. Part I consists of over 100 "artistic" images, a listing of Bauhaus photography exhibits, an example of a Dessau Bauhaus lesson plan, including photography, and essays on various aspects of photography by Peterhans, Moholy, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Ernst Kallai, Fritz Kuhr, Willi Baumeister, Adolf Behne, Max Burchartz, Will Grohmann, and Ludwig Kassack. There is also a section on the use of photography with typography. Part II is a Bauhaus album - nearly 400 illustrations of applied photography documenting the Bauhaus buildings, classroom projects, or day-today activities of students and faculty. Egidio Marzona has assembled the world's foremost collection of works on paper documenting the revolutionary efforts of the Bauhaus. Marzona is also a well-known publisher of books on Russian Constructivism, Futurism, De Stijl, Dadaism, and a host of other movements and figures of the 20th-century avant-garde.