Wrigley Building by Night, Chicago (Wrigley Gebäude bei Nacht, Chicago)

From a vantage point across the Chicago River, Umbo captured the Wrigley Building bathed in artificial light. He had learned to compose photographs with dramatic lighting and unexpected vantage points as a student at the Bauhaus. Shadowed on the right is the Tribune Tower, for which Walter Gropius—the Bauhaus director during Umbo’s time at the school—had unsuccessfully proposed a design in the early 1920s. After an Allied bombing raid on Berlin destroyed his negatives in 1943, Umbo struggled to rebuild his career. Invited to photograph the United States in 1952, the photographer looked out at a skyline in the midst of being reshaped by another Bauhaus director, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.