“Life without photographs is no longer imaginable. They pass before our eyes and awaken our interest; they pass through the atmosphere, unseen and unheard, over distances of thousands of miles. They are in our lives, our lives are in them”
-Lucia Moholy
Lucia Moholy self portrait, c.1930 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Photography and the Bauhaus
Photographer and writer Lucia Moholy (1894–1989, née Schulz) was born in Prague and spoke several languages, including German, Czech, English, French and Hungarian. She described herself as a “documentarist”, but she left her mark both in artistic circles and in the field of information studies. Lucia was instrumental in the creation of the ‘Bauhaus’ aesthetic movement of the 1920s, and published more than 600 photographs, microfilms, letters, articles and books. Thanks to the ‘Exposures’ exhibition at the Kunsthalle Praha by Prof. Dr Jordan Troeller, more of her work will be visible to the public on display in Prague until October 2024.
Despite her talent and expertise, much of Moholy’s photography work remained unknown, either misattributed to her husband László Moholy-Nagy, or to Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus.
Gropius came into possession of her glass negatives of the Bauhaus itself, when Moholy had to flee Germany due to the Nazi rise to power, and not only distributed her images without her consent whilst claiming he did not possess them, but also refused to return the negatives to her until 1957 following a legal dispute. Gropius had even promised the original glass works to the museum he was affiliated with, instead of returning them to Molohy. He was fully aware that she desired their return, was facing financial difficulties, and had explicitly stated that no reproductions should be made without her consent. Even when this was all concluded, Lucia never received all of her glass negatives back, and some of those that were returned to her were damaged.
Contributions to Microfilm
Lucia possessed talents beyond photography, even though it is her most renowned skill. She was also the head of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux during the decades before and after World War II, quickly becoming responsible for training those in her department in microfilming documents to send to America for the ‘Emergency Project’, becoming the director in 1942. Her unit utilised both a Recordak Microfilm Reader, Model C (an example of which is proudly owned by Genus), and a Depue Printer, which produced positive images from photographic negatives.
Her engagement with microfilm and microphotography was longstanding; she had been in communication with Paul Otlet, the creator of the Universal Decimal Classification and a pioneer in information science, since 1932 to explore emerging techniques and the role of photography in documentation.
Peacetime contributions
Following the war, she continued to innovate, exploring how microfilm readers could aid disabled and injured soldiers. She proposed that these devices could project reading materials onto hospital bed ceilings, enabling those with restricted mobility or hand use to read without needing to move. She also travelled to Istanbul and Ankara in order to help them develop their own libraries.
Whilst her work in both photography and microfilm certainly became more prominent in later years, we are thrilled to see present day visibility of someone so instrumental to the development of the microphotography and microfilm industry!
The exhibition is organized by Kunsthalle Praha in collaboration with Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, and will be on display from 8 February to 1 June 2025. It features a comprehensive catalogue edited by Jordan Troeller, which includes scholarly essays and is published by Hatje Cantz.
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