Last weekend, I had the chance to visit the remarkable exhibition Lucia Moholy – Exposures at the Fotostiftung Schweiz. What I experienced was more than just a walk through the visual history of the 20th century. It was an intense encounter with a visionary woman whose influence on modern photography—and modern art itself—has long been underestimated or outright erased.
Lucia Moholy (1894–1989) is often recognized in connection with the Bauhaus. Her sharply composed black-and-white photographs of the Dessau architecture and the Bauhaus community have become some of the most iconic images of the movement. But the exhibition makes one thing very clear: Moholy was far more than the “Bauhaus photographer.” She was a documentarian, art historian, critic, writer, archivist, and an early pioneer in the field of information science.
One of the most interesting sections of the show deals with Moholy’s struggle for recognition and artistic authorship. After World War II, with renewed access to international publications, she was shocked to find many of her photographs reproduced in books and magazines—without any credit. Most notably, her images appeared in the catalogue for the major Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938, curated by Walter and Ise Gropius along with Herbert Bayer. These were the very negatives Moholy believed had been lost or destroyed during the war.
Through meticulous research, she discovered that Walter Gropius had taken the glass negatives with him when he emigrated to the U.S. via London. He denied possessing them for years and later refused to return them. Only in 1957—after lengthy legal battles—did Moholy recover a portion of her work. Of the 560 negatives Gropius had taken, 230 were eventually returned. The rest remain missing to this day. Moholy would later describe the experience as “deeply unsettling.” And it’s hard not to see it as emblematic of a broader pattern of erasure and appropriation that women artists have long faced.
The exhibition presents Moholy’s full body of work for the first time, spanning from the 1910s through the 1970s. It includes rare portraits from her time in London, her editorial and critical writing, and her groundbreaking experiments with microfilm technology in the UK and Turkey—highlighting her ahead-of-her-time understanding of information systems and accessibility.
Her final decades in Zurich are also beautifully addressed. From her home in Zollikon, she maintained close ties with the emerging Fotostiftung Schweiz, which now holds a large collection of her photographs and has co-organized this long-overdue tribute.
Curated by an international team led by Christelle Havranek (Kunsthalle Praha), with Jordan Troeller, Meghan Forbes, and Czech-American artist Jan Tichy, the exhibition also features contemporary works that reflect on Moholy’s legacy. Tichy’s microfilm installation is a standout—a poetic, almost meditative piece that transforms the aesthetics of information storage into a sensory experience. It invites reflection on memory, erasure, and the politics of visibility in the digital age. Additional works by Tichy are also on display in the oxyd Kunsträume.
Lucia Moholy – Exposures is more than a retrospective. It’s a necessary act of reclamation. It asks who gets to write history, who is left out, and how we can begin to correct that. Moholy’s story is not just about photographs—it’s about ownership, authorship, and the right to be seen.
I highly recommend this exhibition—not only to photography lovers, but to anyone interested in feminist art history, archival justice, and the ongoing process of giving credit where credit has always been due.
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Read more on my previous Blogposts:
Post 1: Women in Art: A Journey Through Milan’s Galleries and Museums https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/03/10/women-in-art-a-journey-through-milans-galleries-and-museums-isaberg98/
Post 2: Crash of Colors at KKL Lucerne https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/03/15/crash-of-colors-at-kkl-lucerne-christine-streuli-isaberg98/
Post 3: Lucerne: Roma Stories with Needle and Thread (Video included) https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/03/25/lucerne-roma-stories-with-needle-and-thread-video-included-isaberg98/
Post 4: Who owns the stars? https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/04/21/who-owns-the-stars-isaberg98/
Post 5: Aperol & Art: Alba’s Playful Vernissage in Basel (Reel included) https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/05/05/aperol-art-albas-playful-vernissage-in-basel-reel-included-isaberg98/
