ABSTRACT
Marianne Brandt's design proposes the substitution of the traces of labor formerly visible in handmade objects with a simulated "photographic" surface, suggestive of optical plays generated by the camera lens, that makes female agency and work—domestic or artistic—visible. The photographs that Lucia Moholy's took in 1924 and 1927 as part of her documentation of Bauhaus products and friends provide a point of departure for approaching Brant's works and self-portrait photography. Brandt's designs and self-portrait photographs resituate the development in the framework of changing gender relations as a source of new symbolic and associative meanings, mapping onto each other female and domestic labor, photographic practice, and design work. Brandt's Untitled spherical reflection resituates the object from the sphere of commodity display and rationalized discourse into the field of human involvement. The nostalgic element of Untitled already foreshadows Brandt's last spherical design made at Ruppelwerk, Gotha, where she found employment after leaving the Bauhaus.
