Lucia Moholy Exposures

Lucia Moholy
A prolific writer, photographer, portraitist, and documentarian, Lucia Moholy defies categorization. She was as active in avant-garde circles as she was in the field of information science, advancing an expansive understanding of visual reproduction. While previous publications on Moholy have limited her accomplishments to the five years she spent at the Bauhaus, Lucia Moholy: Exposures presents the full breadth of her writings and photographs for the first time. Extensive essays drawing on new archival discoveries offer insights into her early life in turn-of-thecentury Prague, her involvement in the radical social movements of the 1920s in Weimar Germany, her emigration to London, where colleagues and friends included members of the Bloomsbury Group as well as her wartime involvement with microfilm and scientific documentation and her work in the Middle East on behalf of UNESCO. Acknowledging her reception by contemporary artists such as Jan Tichý, the publication demonstrates how Moholy’s interdisciplinary approach to photography anticipated the medium’s post-analogue present.

LUCIA MOHOLYs (1894–1989) photographs in the aesthetics of the New Objectivity continue to shape the international reception of the Bauhaus to this day. After studying art history and philosophy in her native Prague, she worked as an editor before arriving at the Bauhaus with her husband László Moholy-Nagy in 1923. Her bestselling book A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939 was highly influential for the recognition of the medium as an art form. In 1959 she settled in Switzerland, where she continued to work as an art critic.