Schirmeinski and Jircksen

T. Lux Feininger studied at the Bauhaus, the famed interdisciplinary school in Germany that opened in 1919 to fuse art with industry. While it may have been perfectly suited to the school’s agenda, formal instruction in photography began only ten years later. In a way, students were freer when it was excluded from the official curriculum; they could play around with the camera and show themselves having fun. A member of a student jazz band, here Feininger captured two musicians as part of a larger, casual chronicle of fellow students in and out of the classroom. The raking angle of this picture suggests jazz’s elegant yet devilish effect, destabilizing in its euphoria.