Lucia Moholy

Lucia Moholy (née Schulz; 18 January 1894 — 17 May 1989) was a photographer and publications editor. Her photos documented the architecture and products of the Bauhaus, and introduced their ideas to a post-World War II audience. However, Moholy was seldom credited for her work, which was often attributed to her husband László Moholy-Nagy or to Walter Gropius.

Early career In the early years of World War I, Schulz began to work in Wiesbaden, Germany, as theater critic for a local newspaper.

Personal life

In Berlin in April 1920, Schulz met László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), a recent émigré from Hungary.

After World War II ended, Moholy started a campaign to emigrate to the United States. Documentation for the application included a letter from her brother, Franz, who had a successful career, a good income and had offered to support her. Moholy-Nagy provided her with an offer of a position as photography professor in Chicago. as well as the students and teachers. Her aesthetic was part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, which focused on documentation from a straightforward perspective. Moholy's Bauhaus photographs helped construct the identity of the school and create its image.

In 1925, the book Malerei, Photografie, Film (1925; Painting, Photography, Film) was published only under Moholy-Nagy's name, even though she had contributed to all of the experimentation. This lack of recognition was evident in numerous publications.

Lucia Moholy struggled to receive recognition for her work. Her images were widely used for marketing and in the Bauhaus school’s sales catalogs, as well as Bauhaus-published books that she edited. An interest in the Bauhaus started to grow in the late 1930s, and she saw numerous catalogs of the Bauhaus printed with her lost images. Gropius had been using her photographs without crediting her.

Some relevant letters between Walter Gropius and Lucia Moholy are displayed on the website 99% Invisible. Her 1972 publication, Moholy-Nagy Notes, was an attempt to reclaim credit for her work that was printed without permission. which was published in 1939 by Penguin Books, under their Pelican Special imprint. The book sold 40,000 copies, but no further editions were published due to paper shortages.

During WWII, Moholy became involved in working in microfilm, through connections with Eugene Power of University Microfilms International who organized the microfilming of documents for the US office of the Coordinator of Information. She was appointed director of the ASLIB Microfilm Service (AMS), at the Science Museum, London, as part of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB). The service moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum in April 1943, where it remained for the next three years, sponsored by the British and US governments and the Rockefeller Foundation. Much of the team's work was highly secretive, and involved the copying of scientific and technical publications and papers using Kodak's Recordak Microfile cameras.

Photographs attributed to Lucia Moholy are held in the Conway Library at The Courtauld Institute of Art whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project. Many of the portraits she made while in Britain are held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin.

From 1946 to 1957, immediately after World War II, she traveled to the Near and Middle East where she did microfilm projects for UNESCO, and directed documentary films.

In her book, A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839-1939, she discussed in depth the history of the medium. The book was reviewed by Beaumont Newhall in 1941, who complained that it did not give enough account of stylistic changes in photography: Newhall wanted to give photography its own history, distinct from the wider histories of art and technology, but Moholy situated photography within these larger contexts, emphasising the mutual dependence of different media and practices.

In her 1972 publication, entitled Moholy-Nagy Notes , she included the shared collaboration between herself and László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, in an attempt to reclaim artistic credit for her photographs and experimentation.