Laboratories and Classrooms
One highly influential legacy of modernist photography in central Europe is darkroom experimentation, which, for many, represented a key path for ‘truly modern’ photography.
Innovative processes and techniques for taking and developing photographic images were not kept private in artists’ studios. Instead, they were taught to rows of willing pupils in art schools from Berlin to Lviv, Prague, and Bratislava, where the teenage student Ernő Berda made his alluring study Hand. Works of this sort were displayed in large instructive exhibitions mounted across the region. Among the schools, the most famous was the Bauhaus, which thrived in various German cities from 1919 until 1933, when it was forcibly closed under the new Nazi regime.
