The Photography Workshop
Walter Peterhans brought a professional studio background to the Bauhaus. Before his appointment in 1929 by Hannes Meyer, he had run a freelance studio in Berlin specialising in industrial and portrait photography. He arrived to establish the school’s first dedicated photography department — initially integrated into Joost Schmidt’s advertising workshop at Dessau — and continued through the Berlin phase under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe until the school closed in 1933.
His pedagogical approach started from the camera’s technical capabilities: optics, photochemistry, large-format view cameras on tripods, controlled lighting, precise exposure. Photography, in this framework, was a discipline with specific inherent strengths for recording the objective properties of things — texture, form, tonal gradation, the quality of a surface — and those capabilities should be mastered before anything else was attempted. Students learned to produce images of the highest technical precision as a form of training the eye, not as an aesthetic end in themselves.
His Practice
Peterhans’s own still lifes demonstrate the method. Works such as Dead Hare (Still Life with Foil) (c. 1929) and his compositions with glassware arrange everyday or found objects — fabrics, glass, organic matter, feathers — in carefully controlled setups that isolate texture, structure, and tonal gradation. The images are not cold; they attend closely to the particular properties of each surface, and that attention produces its own kind of precision and presence. But the precision is the point. Beauty, if it appears, follows from looking carefully at material reality rather than from the photographer’s expressive choices.
This approach stood in deliberate contrast to László Moholy-Nagy’s earlier influence on Bauhaus photography — photograms, dynamic Leica angles, solarisation, experimental darkroom work that treated light itself as subject matter. Peterhans’s photography was oriented toward things rather than phenomena. Both approaches were present at the Bauhaus at different moments; Peterhans’s defined the school’s later, more consolidated phase.
After the Bauhaus closed, Peterhans emigrated and from 1938 taught visual training and foundation courses at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago alongside Mies van der Rohe — bringing the same attentiveness to proportion, form, texture, and material into the context of an American architecture school that was, by its own route, attempting something related to what the Bauhaus had tried.