Masters of photography
I’m a professional photographer based in Berlin, specialized in portrait, fashion & nude photography.At the center of my work is the human form. What fascinates me is making the aura of a person visible with just a few means. Often the small details tell the story. I work with all the possibilities a photographer has. Lately, I prefer analogue-cameras to put my aesthetic ideas into being. Hannes Caspar
Ever since some creative know-it-all came up with this widespread witticism, saying “One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words”, the necessity to say anything about Oliver Rath is basically obsolete. Year of birth (78), place of birth (Heidelberg) – who cares about it anyway? His mover/shaker-mentality, his DJing-past, his talent to translate boredom of one thing into a passion for another one – it is all nice things to say about him, but you actually don’t need to know. His DIY-enthusiasm, that built up the whole technical foundation of his existence as a photographer, his mindscape that no school in this world could have teach him, his creative lunacy that’s hidden beneath this Frankish and easy going surface – they are all pretty ornaments for writings like these, but still: anything you could say about him doesn’t come close to the impression of his pictures.
Those are pictures of a maniac. His imagery is infiltrated by codes of urban hedonism, yet ruptured by sometimes prankish, sometimes caustic humour. It is a hard and rough picture language, a language without diplomatic attachments or compromise, but fuelled with unchecked temper and elegant to subtle sense for semantics. He takes everything in that makes a good picture: geometry, contrast, perspective, arrangement. But more than that, he’s a master of those little things, that push a good picture to become an outstanding one. He is the advocate of maximizing impacts. He’ll find the big talk even in the smallest gestures. He might just slam you in the face with a picture. But he might lick your wounds with the very next one. His sense for the right sentiment is without comparison, be it on national or international scale. Call him man of the moment. What do I say? Call him a depicting chronicler of the Zeitgeist. Well, why do I say so much anyway? Just find one of his pictures and call him your new favourite photographer.
Ruth Bernhard was born in Berlin in 1905, and studied at the Berlin Academy of Art. After moving to New York in 1927, she began a career in commercial photography. Almost a decade later, she met Edward Weston, whose compelling images convinced her that photography was indeed a creative medium. In 1953, Bernhard moved to San Francisco where she continued to live and pursue her many photographic interests. Bernhard is associated with the history of Northern California’s wealth of eminent photographers, among them Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, and Minor White. In a career spanning more than seven decades, she created an imposing body of work. Distinguished by their exquisite use of light, her images have been internationally recognized and acclaimed by her peers. Radiant still lifes and nude forms reflect her passionate search for the universal connection of all things. Bernhard’s work has been exhibited and included in the permanent collections of major museums and universities in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Mexico, and has been published worldwide.
Feininger combined an architect’s love of precision, space, and technique with an artist’s love of sweeping vistas. Although an American citizen, Feininger did not come to the United States until he was 33. Son of the late acclaimed artist Lyonel Feininger, he was born in Paris in 1906, and graduated with highest honors in architecture from schools in Germany. At the time, Feininger was using a camera as a reference aid in creating his building designs. The camera became his mechanical sketchbook.
Commissions were scarce for non-European citizens in the depressed economy. After a year’s work in France for the legendary architect Le Corbusier, followed by a struggle to find employment in Stockholm, Feininger turned his attention full-time to photography. He sold his first photos in 1932, moved with his family to the United States in 1939, and in 1943 became a staff photographer for LIFE magazine where he completed more than 430 assignments in a twenty year span.
Full of towering skyscrapers, broad swaths of road, and angles of geometric perfection, Feininger’s works are masterful in their technical excellence and panoramic grandeur. Such timeless images as New York Landscape Seen From Eight Miles Away in New Jersey, 1947 are notable for their harmony, balance, and grand scale. Through Feininger’s trained eye, the beauty and intricacies of both the natural and man-made world were magnified and intensified. From the broad span of bridges, exuding progress and power, to the symmetrical perfection of the skeleton of a carbon viper, Feininger’s images revealed a new aesthetic of order and geometric perfection. Even a seemingly utilitarian object like a doctor’s head mirror possesses mesmerizing, symbolic qualities when seen through Feininger’s lens.
Feininger had said that the city had attracted him since his earliest days as a photographer. But in time this love grew to include all the aspects of the city and its buildings, its people, its cars and traffic jams, its confusion and even its ugliness. I see the city as a living organism: dynamic, sometimes violent, and even brutal, he stated.
Marianne Breslauer was born in Berlin on November 20, 1909. The daughter of Dorothea Breslauer and Prof. Alfred Breslauer launched her career as a photographer in 1927.
Having trained at ‘Lette–Haus’, Berlin, Breslauer travelled to Paris in 1929 where she met Man Ray. He encouraged her straight away to pursue her own photographic ideals. Magazine publications of her works in ‘Für die Frau’ and ‘Frankfurter Zeitung’ met with considerable success.
She returned to Berlin in 1930 to start work with Elsbeth Hedenhausen at the Ullstein photographic studio. In 1931 she embarked on a two–month tour of Palestine; in 1932 she left the Ullstein studio to return to Paris.
Her works were regularly published in magazines such as ‘Das Magazin’, ‘Wochenschau’, ‘Weltspiegel’ and ‘die neue linie’. In 1933 the Academia agency sent her on a photographic assignment to Spain in the company of the Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Following the Nazi coup, Breslauer did not return to Germany but travelled to Zürich instead where she obtained work with the ‘Zürcher Illustrierte’ through Arnold Kübler, its editor-in-chief. Her photo series about the satirical revues at the ‘Pfeffermühle’ originated in this context.
Family matters prompted her return to Berlin in ca. 1934, where she initially worked for the Ullstein magazines ‘Uhu’ and ‘Die Dame’; she also published under the pseudonym ‘Ipp’ for the Kind photographic agency, and for Deutscher Kunstverlag; ‘Funkstunde’ and ‘Gebrauchsgraphik’ also published Breslauer’s photographs.
In 1936, having married art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, Marianne Breslauer decided to leave Germany and to immigrate to the Netherlands. In 1938 she gave up her activity as a professional photographer, embarking on new ventures instead.
Peter Lindbergh is a German photographer and filmmaker. He currently maintains residences in Paris, Manhattan, and Arles. Peter was born on November 23, 1944 in Leszno, Poland. He spent his childhood in Duisburg.
After a basic school education he worked as a window dresser for the Karstadt and Horten department stores in Duisburg. At 18, he moved to Switzerland. Eight months later, he went from Lucerne to Berlin and took evening courses at the Academy of Arts. He hitchhiked to Arles in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. After several months in Arles, he continued through to Spain and Morocco, a journey that took him two years.
Returning to Germany, he studied Free Painting at the College of Art in Krefeld. In 1969, while still a student, he exhibited his work for the first time at the Galerie Denise René – Hans Mayer. Concept Art marked his last period of interest in art. In 1971 his interest turned toward photography and for two years he worked as the assistant to the Düsseldorf-based photographer, Hans Lux.
Peter Lindbergh moved to Paris in 1978 and started working internationally for Vogue, first the Italian, then the English, French, German, and American Vogue, later for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Allure, and Rolling Stone. His mostly black-and-white photographs, implement a pictorial language that takes its lead from early German cinema and from the Berlin art scene of the 1920s.
Adolf Fassbender (1884-1980) was born in Grevenbroich, Germany, a small town near Cologne. Before entering the military, he initially assisted a photographer in Freiburg, Germany and subsequently worked in Dresden (where he also studied drawing and painting), Vienna (where he began specializing in hand-colored miniature portraits), and Antwerp. In 1911, he immigrated to the United States. He was first employed by the Selby Sisters and in 1921 opened his own New York studio. For the next seven years, he produced commercial, illustrative, and portrait photographs, some of which were exhibited at national conventions of the Photographers’ Association of America. He closed the business in 1928.
At about this time, Fassbender became interested in pictorialism and began making creative pictures with the camera. He exhibited in pictorial salons for twenty years, beginning in 1925, when his work was first accepted by London’s Royal Photographic Society. He presented solo shows in 1934 at the Camera Club of New York and in 1951 at the Smithsonian Institution. He joined camera clubs in New York, received honorary memberships from groups elsewhere, and was a founding member of the Photographic Society of America.
Fassbender shared his techniques and theories by writing for the photographic press. He began in the early 1930s with a short series of articles in Camera about various control methods. His article “Why Bother,” about the importance of manipulating the negative, was printed over time by three different publications. Most significant was his book Pictorial Artistry: The Dramatization of the Beautiful in Photography, published in 1937.
After closing his studio in the late 1920s, Fassbender made his living as an instructor. He taught photography at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences from 1930 to 1935 and in the late 1940s at the Central Branch Brooklyn YMCA. He also conducted private and group classes at his Manhattan and New Jersey residences and lectured to camera clubs and professional conventions throughout the country. Over the course of his teaching career, from which he retired in 1970, he had more than 18,000 students.
Toni Schneiders is one of Germany’s most important photographers after 1945.
Together with Peter Keetmann, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstoßer, he founded the group “fotoform” in 1949. This group was a loose organization of experimental photographers, who took up an outstanding position within the artistic photography in post-war Europe. Stylistically, the artists tied in with the photographic experiments of the ‚Neues Sehen’ of the 1920s, while formally and aesthetically trying to strike a new path after the cultural barbarianism of the Nazi period.
The stylistic movement of ‚subjective photography’, which the group developed – characterized by formal abstraction and its pictorial claim – is, from today’s point of view, the most important contribution to the renewal of photography in Germany after 1945. It is not the objective rendering of reality which ‚subjective photography’ strives for, but the pictorial analysis and personal interpretation through subjective pictorial ideas. The result is a formally conscious structural black and white photography with stressed graphic values.
As such, the group succeeded to break away from the conventional, traditional form of photography of the time in an outstanding manner.
Since the beginning of the 1950s, Schneiders worked as a freelance photographer, concentrating on a combination of form and content.
With his camera, he captured motifs from art, architecture, landscape and industry – in diverse emotional moods, whether melancholic, poetic or serene.
From the end of the fifties, Toni Schneiders’ photographs document his tireless journeys which led him to Ethiopia, diverse European countries, Japan and South East Asia. In these works, he kept hold of his curiosity for “these things out there”.
Schneiders received the culture award of the German Society for Photography in 1999, together with Siegfried Lauterwasser and Wolfgang Reiseweitz.
Renger-Patzsch was born in Würzburg and began making photographs by age twelve. After military service in the First World War he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In the early 1920s he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer and, in 1925, publishing a book, The choir stalls of Cappenberg. He had his first museum exhibition in 1927.
A second book followed in 1928, Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful). This, his best-known book, is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. The book’s title was chosen by his publisher; Renger-Patzsch’s preferred title for the collection was Die Dinge (“Things”).
In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style his work exemplifies the esthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object] He wrote: “The secret of a good photograph—which, like a work of art, can have esthetic qualities—is its realism … Let us therefore leave art to artists and endeavor to create, with the means peculiar to photography and without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”
Erwin Blumenfeld proved himself to be one of photography’s greatest pioneers during his 35-year-long career, breaking new ground in formal experimentation, developing innovative concepts through his fashion shoots, and enjoying unprecedented commercial success as a result.
Blumenfeld’s entry into photography was somewhat serendipitous: in the early 1930s, while running a leather shop in Amsterdam, he uncovered a fully equipped darkroom behind a boarded-up door in a storeroom, allegedly left behind by a previous tenant.
So he began experimenting, eventually forging a path for himself as a portrait photographer and displaying his photos in the shop’s windows. His earliest creations – collages and satirical pieces created in the Dadaist tradition to channel his anti-war sentiment – are a fascinating insight into his work.
As his practice evolved, Blumenfeld continued to reject photography’s formal limitations, playing instead with double and triple exposures, solarisation and high-contrast printing to achieve his uncompromising artistic vision.
As Blumenfeld turned from art to fashion photography – he made his debut in Vogue with the help of fashion royalty Cecil Beaton in 1944, and his dynamic concepts and exaltation of women made him a favourite among the most influential fashion magazines of the day – these progressive techniques only continued.
I was born in 1984 in a small town near Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Very early in my life, I became interested in photography and soon started with sports photography (cycling). Some years later, I began to focus on people and nude photography, a sphere that began to captivate me and until now remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration. I studied French and British Studies at the university of Mainz. Photography is a passion for me, but not my profession.
Living and working near Mannheim, Germany.
Martin’s work is about the human element in urban space. He explores the underlying emotions in the city between existential angst, boredom and joy. Martin is a keen observer of the fragility and transiency in urban life. In his street photography Martin emphasizes the contrast between the soft fluid human shape and the hard and static fabric of city infrastructure. Martin uses strong geometrical compositions, still he thinks of his photography as associative and poetic.
Michael Papendieck is a German photographer born in 1970, dedicated to this since 1989.
Since 2005 he works as a freelance photographer, author and teacher, and since 2009 he teach photography in FF-Fotoschule (Hamburg, Germany)
Nowadays he’s based in Braunschweig.
Barbara Klemm is a German press photographer who worked for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 45 years. She photographed many of the most important events in recent German history and has received honors including Fellowship of the Academy of Arts, Berlin and the Pour le Mérite, and she was inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame in recognition of her status as “a driving force in reportage photography” and as “an exemplary photographer”.
Central to Tillmans’ career has been an extended flirtation with banality, pursued not merely for its own sake, in a spirit of slacker irony, but with the deep, philosophical conviction that no aspect of the social, physical or political world is devoid of meaning or unworthy of investigation. If individual images occasionally fall flat out of context . . . it needn’t detract from virtue of the pursuit and the value of such a holisitic perspective.” In other words, if one thing matters, everything matters.
Holly Myers
Frank Eugene Smith, who was later known by his artist name Frank Eugene and who adopted German citizenship in 1906, was born in New York in 1865. After a first training at the City College, Eugene began to study painting in New York in 1884 and switched to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich in 1886. During his years of study Eugene began to be interested in the new media of photography and studied further autodidactically. As soon as 1889 Eugene had his first one-man show at the Camera-Club’ in New York, which was founded by Alfred Stieglitz. After his graduation Eugene returned to New York in 1894 and worked for some years as a stage designer and portrait painter, specialising in portraying well-known theatre-actors. Since 1900 he lived in Germany again and got envolved with artistic photography, was admitted to the Linked ring’ in London and founded – together with Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – the American photographer’s society Photo-Session’. Between 1904 and 1910 Eugene’s works were published as heliographs in the advanced photography journal Camera Work’ and became internationally known. Eugene orientated himself in his photographs at painting, following the romanticising style of art photography: Eugene’s treatment of the negatives with opaque colours and etching needle led to his wanted pictorial and graphic effects and with his favoured techniques like platinum print and the rubber-bichrome.technique, he achieved the modern blur of his positives. Since 1907 Eugene began his educational work at the Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt für Fotographie in Munich, which he continued at his chair for artistic photography at the Königliche Akademie für Grafische Künste in Leipzig in 1913. In 1907 Eugene organised a meeting between Stieglitz, Steichen and Heinrich Kühn and brought forward the assimilation of German art photographers to American guidelines. Frank Eugene died in Munich in 1936.
Ever since some creative know-it-all came up with this widespread witticism, saying “One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words”, the necessity to say anything about Oliver Rath is basically obsolete. Year of birth (78), place of birth (Heidelberg) – who cares about it anyway? His mover/shaker-mentality, his DJing-past, his talent to translate boredom of one thing into a passion for another one – it is all nice things to say about him, but you actually don’t need to know. His DIY-enthusiasm, that built up the whole technical foundation of his existence as a photographer, his mindscape that no school in this world could have teach him, his creative lunacy that’s hidden beneath this Frankish and easy going surface – they are all pretty ornaments for writings like these, but still: anything you could say about him doesn’t come close to the impression of his pictures.
Those are pictures of a maniac. His imagery is infiltrated by codes of urban hedonism, yet ruptured by sometimes prankish, sometimes caustic humour. It is a hard and rough picture language, a language without diplomatic attachments or compromise, but fuelled with unchecked temper and elegant to subtle sense for semantics. He takes everything in that makes a good picture: geometry, contrast, perspective, arrangement. But more than that, he’s a master of those little things, that push a good picture to become an outstanding one. He is the advocate of maximizing impacts. He’ll find the big talk even in the smallest gestures. He might just slam you in the face with a picture. But he might lick your wounds with the very next one. His sense for the right sentiment is without comparison, be it on national or international scale. Call him man of the moment. What do I say? Call him a depicting chronicler of the Zeitgeist. Well, why do I say so much anyway? Just find one of his pictures and call him your new favourite photographer.
Josef Breitenbach was born on the 3rd of April 1896 into a middle-class wine-merchant family of Jewish descent. He attended technical high school from 1912–15 and trained as a salesman for an instrument firm and later as a book keeper for an insurance firm. He attended Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich (philosophy and art history, 1914 to 1917) and became active in the Youth Section and later the Pacifist wing of the Social Democratic Party. In 1918, he took part in the Soviet-inspired Bavarian coup d’état, which was the first spark of the revolutionary fire that swept over Germany in the wake of the armistice. For a few months, Breitenbach also occupied an official position in the new government. Although the revolution was short-lived, the ties he forged with the radical circles of Munich’s intelligentsia later helped him establish his reputation as a photographer.
In 1932, after several unsuccessful years at the head of the family business—during which period he was mainly engaged with perfecting his use of a camera—Breitenbach opened his first photographic studio. His clients were prominent members of Munich’s bohemia, including actors and actresses performing in the Munich theater. Munich was a stronghold of libertarians and refined people, whose spirit Breitenbach captured in theatrical portraits of his friend, the journalist Theo Riegler. This world vanished in 1933 with Hitler’s takeover.
More than his Jewish roots, the photographer’s political past made him a target for persecution. In August, 1933, a band of Sturmabteilung (SA) storm troopers, members of Hitler’s private army, banged on the door of his studio. Using a portrait of German nobleman Franz von Papen he’d taken the year before when he was Chancellor of Germany, and a letter of thanks he’d received, Breitenbach convinced the troopers that he was under Papen’s protection. With his passport about to expire, Breitenbach made his way to France a few days later, joining other German exiles seeking refuge in Paris.
The Surrealist “revolution” had by then become dominant in the Parisian art scene. Soon after his arrival, Breitenbach came into contact with André Breton and his circle. Preferring to retain his independence, he never became a member of the Surrealist group, but did show work in important exhibitions of Surrealist photography alongside Man Ray, Jacques-André Boiffard, Brassaï, Eli Lotar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Roger Parry.
Breitenbach only lived in Paris for six years, until the war broke out in 1939. Yet during this period, he produced some of his most inventive work. He adopted several techniques favored by new photographers such as superimpression, montage, solarization, printing in negative, and the photogram. More importantly, he was one of the rare artists of the pre-War years to produce color photographs, which he did by using processes of bleaching, toning and pigmentation. Examples are the images “Montparnasse”, “Portrait of a Woman in Black and Red”, and Forever and Ever.
During his years in Paris, he was also an active member of the German exile community, which alerted the democratic world to the threat of fascism. He participated in the 1938 exhibition by the Union des Artistes Allemandes Libres, “Five Years of Hitler Dictatorship”. A high point for Breitenbach was his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, summarized by portraits of the playwright. The war interrupted this second chapter of the photographer’s life. Interned by the French as a suspicious alien, then drafted into a civilian corps composed of foreigners, Breitenbach eventually escaped to New York from Marseille in 1941.
Breitenbach seemingly had no trouble adjusting to America. New York, the city in which he would spend the rest of his life, became home to him, as evidenced by his photomontage of 1942, “We New Yorkers”. He responded to the electric beat of the city, composing photographs such as “Radio City” (1942) that have a jazz-like quality.
The 1950s and 1960s were years of intense activity for Breitenbach. He did photographic reportage in Asia for the United Nations and other varied businesses, documenting relief work. He exhibited his photographs extensively in the United States from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The time not spent on the road was spent absorbed by his teaching at Cooper Union and The New School.
Since his death in New York on the 7th of October 1984, there have been 26 one person exhibitions of his work, shown in New York, Paris, Berlin, Munich, and multiple other locations in both Europe in the United States. Eight books have been published on his work, including two by Larissa Dryansky (Josef Breitenbach and Josef Breitenbach Manifesto) and Josef Breitenbach Photographien, published by Schirmer/Mosel. The Josef Breitenbach archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucso
Martin’s work is about the human element in urban space. He explores the underlying emotions in the city between existential angst, boredom and joy. Martin is a keen observer of the fragility and transiency in urban life. In his street photography Martin emphasizes the contrast between the soft fluid human shape and the hard and static fabric of city infrastructure. Martin uses strong geometrical compositions, still he thinks of his photography as associative and poetic.
His work draws inspiration from many sources beyond the world of photography: literature with the work of J.P. Sartre, Paul Bowles and Michel Houellebecq, painting between Rembrandt, Hopper and Penck, poetry with Baudelaire, Benn and Celan, movies from “The Third Man” to the work of Jim Jarmush and Wong Kar-wai and the recent “Victoria” and tv series like “The Wire” and “Fargo”.
