The Bauhaus occupies a place of its own in the history of 20th century culture, architecture, design, art and new media. Photography, both as a relatively new medium and a machine-based one, played a key role in the experimental work at the Bauhaus, involving both work with the materials themselves in photograms as well as the use of the camera. One of the first colleges of design, it brought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists and was not only an innovative training center but also a place of production and a focus of international debate.
At a time when industrial society was in the grip of a crisis, the Bauhaus stood almost alone in asking how the modernization process could be mastered by means of design. Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus rallied masters and students who sought to reverse the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity and developing exemplary designs for objects and spaces that were to form part of a more humane future society.
Following intense internal debate, in 1923 the Bauhaus turned its attention to industry under its founder and first director Walter Gropius (1883-1969). Gropius's aim was to unify the teachings of all the arts under the umbrella of design and with an eye to producing for the machine age.  The school took some of the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement and updated them, producing designs suitable for mass production and using modern materials like chrome and plastic, including the famous tubular framed and molded plastic chairs. 
Photographs taken by artists who studied at the Bauhaus often reflect the influence of cubism, sometimes using mirrors to produce pictures that are fragmented and spatially ambiguous.  It was Hungarian born László Moholy-Nagy who, in 1923, gave photography a new importance in the Bauhaus' curriculum and practice. He experimented with ways of expression from daring moving light sculptures to experimental films - his radical camera generated works represent only a small part of his production. He felt that artists had to abandon the accepted limits of photography, especially the historical influence of painting, and regard the camera and film as a flexible means of using light to make images.
In the 1920s cars and trains afforded the experience of speed and travel through space and time, views from airplanes gave new perspectives and the perception of reality was changed by the effects of artificial light. These changes created a new visual environment, which in turn altered peoples psychological relationships with their surroundings - Moholy-Nagy maintained that a new visual language had to be developed. These changes, as well as the anxieties which grew out of the  exhilarating but threatening and unsettled nature of Germany in the 1920s, produced emotional effects that had not yet been represented in photographs.  He took the radical view that photography was the quintessential modern medium with which to deal with the psychological effects of the new environment. He understood that the camera and photosensitive film and paper provided a means of expressing a totally new response to his time.  Through his teaching a wide spectrum of individualistic works and experiments were produced by photographers such as Erich Consemüller, Andreas Feininger and T. Lux Feininger, Lucia Moholy, or Walter Peterhans.
The major exhibition which opened in 1923, reflecting the revised principle of art and technology a new unity, spanned the full spectrum of Bauhaus work. The Haus am Horn provided a glimpse of a residential building of the future. In 1924 funding for the Bauhaus was cut so drastically at the instigation of conservative forces that it had to seek a new home.
The Bauhaus moved to Dessau at a time of rising economic fortunes, becoming the municipally funded College of Design. Almost all masters moved with it, while former students became junior masters in charge of the workshops. Dessau produced famous works of art and architecture and influential designs in the years between 1926 and 1932. Walter Gropius resigned as director on April 1, 1928 under the pressure of constant struggles for the Bauhaus survival. He was succeeded by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889-1954) whose work sought to shape a harmonious society. Cost-cutting industrial mass production was to make products affordable for the mass of the population. Despite his successes, Hannes Meyer´s Marxist convictions became a problem for the city council amidst the political turbulence of Germany in 1929, and the following year he was removed from his post. Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) the Bauhaus developed from 1930 into a technical college of architecture with subsidiary art and workshop departments. After the Nazis became the biggest party in Dessau at the elections, the Bauhaus was forced to move in September 1932. Its fresh start in Berlin was short-lived. The Bauhaus dissolved itself under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.