Gray Zones in Black and White: Bauhaus Photography, Realism, and the Limits of Resistance in Nazi Germany

A Folkwang Photo Talk by Elizabeth Otto, University at BuffaloThe Folkwang Photo Talks are a lecture series featuring international scholars and researchers who present and discuss emerging research projects in the field of photography. In this talk, which derives from her ongoing book project, »Bauhaus Under Nazism: Creativity, Collaboration, and Resistance in National-Socialist Germany, 1933–1945«, Elizabeth Otto focuses on members of the Bauhaus art and design school (1919–1933) working in photography during the Nazi period, after the Bauhaus had closed. While regime propagandists and functionaries denigrated many modern art forms as »Entartete Kunst,« photographic imagery continued to be in high demand, and many »Bauhäusler« took photographs as portraits, documentation, and art. The Bauhaus’s photography program had been a late addition to the school, opening only in 1927 under Walter Peterhans, and it attracted a particularly radical group of leftist and communist students. It is therefore no coincidence that the only two Bauhaus members known to have gone into armed resistance against the Nazi regime were both photographers.Yet other Bauhaus photographers made very different choices. This talk shapes out that Bauhaus photographers working in Germany from 1933 to 1945 were not bound together by a singular politics or approach, but how all of them were tapping into this medium’s powerful representational imagery.