Bauhaus Women: Through the Lens

While wandering through Berlin, I spent an afternoon looking at the female photographers of the Bauhaus.

Photography has always occupied an interesting space between observation and invention, and the women working within and around the Bauhaus explored that space with confidence. Through portraiture, architecture, documentary images and experimental abstraction, they used the camera not to record the world, but to question how it might be seen.

Many of the photographs on display felt surprisingly contemporary. Unusual angles, cropped compositions, studies of light and shadow, reflections, geometry and everyday detail all revealed an approach to image-making that still resonates today. Looking through the work, it became clear how many visual ideas we now take for granted were being explored by these artists almost a century ago.

The exhibition brought together around 300 photographs from the Bauhaus-Archiv collection, celebrating women whose contributions have often sat in the shadow of their male contemporaries. While some of the images are instantly recognisable, the names behind them are far less familiar.

What interested me most was not only the historical significance of the work, but the shared instinct that connects these photographers across generations: the desire to look closely, to notice overlooked details, and to find new ways of seeing ordinary surroundings.

As someone who spends a great deal of time walking cities with a camera in hand, photographing fragments, textures, colours and moments that catch my eye, I found myself returning to the same question throughout the exhibition. What makes us stop and look? And how can a photograph transform something everyday into something worth noticing?

The Bauhaus women were asking similar questions nearly one hundred years ago.