The woman who photographed an era—then had to fight to reclaim her own legacy.
As a Bauhaus photographer, Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) was a pioneer of New Objectivity. Her husband László Moholy-Nagy was appointed to the Bauhaus in 1923. They worked there together and László became famous as the inventor of the photogram, a photo without film. Lucia's contribution to this only became known later. When the Czech-born Jew was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazis seized power, she was unable to take her most important possession, her glass negatives, with her. She struggled to keep her head above water in London and worked for the British secret service on the microfilming of valuable documents. With her vision of microfilm as freely accessible information for all, she is now regarded as a pioneer of the Internet. After the war, Lucia set out in search of her glass negatives.
Cinematography
Her glass negatives: luminous, precise, achingly beautiful.
Production
Reconstructing a life from scattered archives across three countries.
Director
Sigrid Faltin
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Lucia's glass negatives were stored in a Berlin warehouse that Gropius later 'forgot' to mention when she asked for help recovering them. He kept hundreds for decades.
Her 1945 book 'A Hundred Years of Photography' became foundational, yet her name rarely appeared in Bauhaus retrospectives during her lifetime. The erasure was systematic, not accidental.
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