Photos of the designer’s residence ^{probably 1933}

Architect Gaston Eysselinck made these photos of his hypermodern home, for which he also designed the serving trolley that can be seen a bit further on. As the sole Ghent representative of the avant-garde, Eysselinck was familiar with the Bauhaus and with related movements such as Russian constructivism and De Stijl. Although the Bauhaus only opened a photography department late in its existence, the rise in the 1920s of photography as an artistic medium was clearly tangible earlier already at the school. According to László Moholy-Nagy the technical process of photography and the magic of light opened up a new way of looking that was necessary in the new, post-war society. Students and other lecturers pictured life at the school through photos. Just as Eysselinck did with these photos, they experimented with ground-level shots and bird’s-eye views (and thus with the reduction of objects to abstract forms), with light and shadow, and with the positioning of photos in a way that brings about new relations between pictures.

SOURCES

Katherine C. Ware, Fotografie aan het Bauhaus, in: Jeannine Fiedler en Peter Feierabend (red.), Bauhaus, Könemann, Keulen, 2000, pp. 506-529;
Met dank aan Marc Dubois.