Werner David Feist: Bauhaus Photos

Werner David Feist

Werner David Feist (1909 – 1998) gained recognition mainly as a result of his experimental photography during his time as a student at the Bauhaus (1927 – 1930). These photos are unique documents of life at the Bauhaus, and at the same time they reflect Feist’s different photographic activities and orientations, first under the influence of László Moholy-Nagy, then from 1929 on under Walter Peterhans’s teaching. Feist’s photos are characterised by unusual perspectives, alienating detail shots and excerpts, double exposures and light and shadow effects, which reveal a new aesthetic view of both objects and people. The often graphically interpreted details and their material quality are presented like still-lifes. Feist’s photographs result from an unconventional perspective that alienates the familiar and puts it in the foreground as the Other. A selection of some twenty recently acquired Bauhaus photos by Feist is included in the permanent exhibition The Bauhaus Collection: Classic Modern Originals.