Amateur Photography from Bauhaus to Instagram MKG Hamburg -

From 3 October 2019 until 12 January 2020, an exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg on amateur photography as it evolved from the Bauhaus period to the era of Instagram. Part of a Germany-wide programme to mark the centenary of Bauhaus and sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes). Amateur Photography from Bauhaus to Instagram MKG Hamburg

Amateur Photography: From Bauhaus to Instagram.

Translators into English: Jennifer Taylor and Alexandra Cox. Translated by Alexandra Cox: Word of Welcome; Here Comes the New Algorithm! Photo Filters and Collective Normalizations, by Ulrike Bergermann; Photographic Activism, Civil Testimony, and Collaborative Visual Politics under the Banner of Digital Connectivity, by Susanne Holsbach. Also some of the artist info and information about featured newspapers. centenary of Bauhaus Bauhaus centenary

You will find the English texts in the back of the catalogue.
Amateur Photography from Bauhaus to Instagram MKG Hamburg
Word of Welcome by the German Federal Cultural Foundation

This book is part of a Germany-wide program to mark the centenary of Bauhaus, a celebration that is uniting over a dozen German federal states and more than one hundred municipalities. Bauhaus monuments delight their visitors across the country. New museums open their doors. With its functional and aesthetic qualities, Bauhaus design enjoys cult status across the world. And yet: After one hundred years, we are still not finished with our critical examination of Bauhaus. No due celebration of cultural heritage is complete without a look at the tangled ambivalence lent by Bauhaus to the Modern Design project—hung between the poles of manual craft and technology, art and commerce, cosmopolitanism and esoterica, paternalism and social experiment. These are just some of the aesthetically and also politically determining lines of force along which Bauhaus unfolds its effect. Bauhaus centenary

“The ultimate goal of all art is the building.” Therefore, in this anniversary year, and mindful of this maxim coined by Walter Gropius, we remember not only steel and glass and white cubing, but also that building of the ideas of Bauhaus which, like the project of modernity as a whole, is insistently unfinished and open at once—and hence similar to the countless questions that link the twenty-first-century crises of our present day to Bauhaus: Questions concerning the freedom of art and education, concerning global resource equity, gender relations, concerning affordable housing, livable cities, or the dominance of smart technology in a post-human modern age.
Amateur Photography from Bauhaus to Instagram MKG Hamburg centenary of Bauhaus
Experimentation and remembrance: In sponsoring the anniversary year, the German Federal Cultural Foundation has constantly attempted to maintain this duality. And so, of subsidies totaling more than 17 million Euro, 5 million Euro alone were earmarked for the “Bauhaus-Agenten” program. Cultural education and ongoing collaborations between Bauhaus museums and young people are foregrounded here, to promote the development of young adults’ own concepts of how houses and cities will be built, how people will dance, take photographs, feed and clothe themselves, how people are going to write and speak in the future—and what role can be played by Bauhaus right along the way.

The German Federal Cultural Foundation thanks the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg under the directorship of Tulga Beyerle and her team, especially also the curator Esther Ruelfs for the successful realization of the exhibition Amateur Photography: From Bauhaus to Instagram, which opens up a multi-perspective view on the creative quality of amateur photography from the early-twentieth-century modern age through to our times and, in doing so, relates today’s layperson photography, characterized by digitization and social networks, to analog beginnings from the Bauhaus milieu. We wish this initiative great success and trust that many people will come and see the exhibition for themselves. Bauhaus centenary

Hortensia Völckers
Executive Board/Artistic Director

Alexander Farenholtz
Executive Board/Administrative Director

Click on the poppy for extracts from the essay by Susanne Holsbach: