Irena Bluhova - The Paver Worker

Irena Bluhova - The Paver Worker

1970, later gelatin silver print from 1933´s original negative, glued on cardboard, 27 x 38 cm, gallery stamp, hand signed by author.
Most of the original work from the 1930s has been destroyed and only later enlargements from the 1970s appear on the market, but even those are rare.


Irena Blühová (1904 – 1991) was one of the first women Slovak photographers and one of the first photographers in Czechoslovakia to use photography as a means of documentary study and social commentary.
In early 1931, Blühová began studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau under the photographer Walter Peterhans. Her formal training there did not last beyond 1932, when the Nazi regime closed the art school, but her work from this point further was influenced by the experimentation and more complex composition, which she learned at Bauhaus.
From 1937 to 1939, Blühová took pottery classes with Julia Horová and studied film at the School of Applied Arts (Slovak: Škola umeleckých remesiel (ŠUR)) with Karel Plicka.