Folkwang Photo Talk with Elizabeth Otto
15.7.2025
We are looking forward to welcome Elizabeth Otto from the University at Buffalo for this summer term’s third Folkwang Photo Talk:
Gray Zones in Black and White: Bauhaus Photography, Realism, and the Limits of Resistance in Nazi Germany
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—Willi Jungmittag and Paul Guermonprez—were both photographers.
Yet other Bauhaus photographers made very different choices; communist activist Fritz Heinze became a photographing bystander to Nazi atrocities, and Alfred Ehrhardt glorified German and Scandinavian landscapes and their people in aestheticized images tailor made to please regime ideologs. Bauhaus photographers working in Germany from 1933 to 1945 were not bound together by a singular politics or approach, but all of them were tapping into this medium’s powerful representational imagery. This gave them access to a visual language of specificity that brought a very different set of potentials and dangers than existed for those Bauhaus members practicing in fields such as architecture, craft, or industrial and interior design.
The talk will be given as the opening of the 20th research colloquium for the theory and history of photography. It will take place on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 6 pm in Folkwang University of the Art’s Quartier Nord, room 2.13. It will be also available on Zoom. Please email us for the link.
Elizabeth Otto’s books include »Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics« (MIT Press, 2019), which received the Peter C. Rollins Book Prize from the Northeast Popular Culture Association, and »Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective«(Bloomsbury, 2019). Currently she is writing a book titled »Bauhaus Under Nazism: Creativity, Collaboration, and Resistance in Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1945.« Beginning in September, she will continue this work as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute and the recipient of Guggenheim and Dedalus Fellowships. Institutions including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the National Gallery of Art, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have also supported her work. In 2024, Otto co-curated the exhibition »Bauhaus and National Socialism,« held in the German city of Weimar, which received the Justus Bier curatorial prize. At the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, she serves as Director of the Humanities Institute and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History.