The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin has announced "New Woman, New Vision. Women Photographers of the Bauhaus," an exhibition that places the school's female lens artists at the centre of the institution's programme.

The title alone signals an institutional correction. For decades the Bauhaus story ran through its male masters, while the women who studied and taught there remained footnotes. This exhibition argues that the camera, more than any other medium at the school, belonged to them.

Photography at the Bauhaus occupied an ambiguous position. The school never founded a formal photography workshop during its early years in Weimar, yet the camera circulated constantly through its studios. Women who were steered away from the metal and cabinetmaking workshops picked up the lens instead, and made it a laboratory for the era's most urgent visual questions.

The exhibition's framing — "New Woman, New Vision" — joins two historical tropes that the 1920s press invented together. The Neue Frau, with her bobbed hair and wage-earning independence, and the New Vision of experimental photography emerged in the same decade. The show treats them as one phenomenon: women used the camera to construct the modern subject they were also becoming.

What does the exhibition cover?

The survey spans the characteristic genres the Bauhaus women opened up:

• Portraiture that tested identity rather than merely recording it
• Self-portraits in mirrors, with masks, in staged doubles
• Photograms and abstract studies made without a camera
• Architectural and material studies in extreme close-up
• Reportage and advertising work from the school's Dessau years

That range matters for practitioners because it shows how the same generation moved between darkroom experiment and commissioned work without treating one as superior. Craft and concept ran on the same track.

Why Berlin, and why now?

The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin holds one of the world's principal Bauhaus collections, and the city itself was the school's final home before its closure in 1933. Presenting the women photographers here returns their work to the urban and institutional context in which much of it was made and first shown.

The exhibition also arrives amid a broader reappraisal. Museums across Germany and beyond have spent recent years rebuilding the Bauhaus canon from the archive up, recovering names that the first histories dropped. Each recovered body of work changes what practitioners inherit: techniques, sequences and professional models that were there all along.

For a contemporary audience, the relevance is structural as much as historical. The questions these photographers asked — who is permitted to photograph, who gets framed, and how a new medium distributes power — remain open arguments in the field today.

The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin has not yet published the full exhibition dates and programming details; visitors should consult the institution's website for confirmed scheduling. What the announcement makes clear is the direction: the Bauhaus photographic canon will keep widening, and the women who built it will keep moving from the appendix to the main text.