Exposures is the first major exhibition of the Prague-born photographer Lucie Moholy (1894-1989). The retrospective at Kunsthalle Praha covers her entire professional career and presents over 600 photographs, microfilms, letters, articles, books and audio recordings, including an installation by contemporary artist Jan Tichý, a native of Prague who lives and works in Chicago.
Jan Tichý first came across the work of Lucie Moholy in Berlin, where he stumbled upon the “case” of the lost negatives. Lucie Moholy, along with her husband Laszlo Moholy Nag, worked at the Bauhaus art school in Dessau, Germany, which Moholy documented. She lost her negatives in unfortunate circumstances during the coming of World War II when she had to escape from Nazis regime and emigrate to London.
It was not until the mid-1940s that Lucia Moholy came into possession of a copy of a 1938 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) catalogue that contained a number of photographs from the Bauhaus period, including her own. To her surprise, however, she was not credited as their author in the captions. As time went on, more and more books and articles about the Bauhaus were published and disseminated by Walter Gropius, who brought Moholy’s negatives to the United States through his work in America.
