Photography

In the late 1840s William and Frederick Langenheim, immigrants from Germany to Philadelphia who were to operate America’s first commercial stereographic photography company, purchased a license for Henry Fox Talbot’s process of photography.

Though they failed to establish the “talbo- type” in the commercially oriented portrait industry against the daguerreotype, the process spread more widely when the value of duplication of a photograph was realized. Photography as an object and a technique gained more attention after 1851, when the wet collodion process devised by the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer came into use. But even before that, the new medium had already gone beyond portraiture and invaded every possible subject. In May 1842 Hermann Biow (1804—1850) of Hamburg documented the ruins of the great fire in that city with a series of daguerreotypes. Though these images are considered to be the first photographs of a catastrophe, the honor of having permanently preserved an image of a catastrophe itself is due to George Barnard (1819—1902). In 1853 Barnard photographed the fire at the Ames Mill in Oswego, New York, said to be the first known work of photojournalism.

Shortly after the medium’s inception, interest in pictures of foreign lands and sights unknown in one’s own town or country soared. Travel photography in the widest sense does not seem to have been uppermost on the agenda of photography enthusiasts in Germany, who tended to concentrate on advancing the technology. However, a few German photographers even traveled as far as the Western Hemisphere; for example, the German-born Augusto Riedel who accompanied Ludwig August Maria Eudo von Sachsen-Coburg- und-Gotha and Orleans on his tour through the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais. Although American photographers journeyed through many parts of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, they devoted the greatest attention to their own country—to the grandeur of extraordinary natural formations and the cultures of Native Americans.

Two of the most popular and prolific photographers of the frontier West were Timothy O’Sullivan (1840—1882), formerly in Brady’s Photographic Corps, and William Henry Jackson (1843—1942), who marketed his own pictures and those of others in America and overseas through his Detroit Publishing Company (at its zenith the company sold 7 million images a year), conveying to Americans and the world a specific visual idea of North America. These images affected twentieth-century photographers of the American West, such as Ansel Adams (1902—1984) and Edward Weston (1886—1958), who in turn left their mark on European and, respectively, German photography and perception of the United States. Whether as images of monumental nature, of the changing urban world, or as reflections of subcultures as in the pictures of San Francisco’s Chinatown taken by German emigre Arnold Genthe (1869-1942) in 1895, photography, then viewed as a mirror of reality, contributed greatly to the formation of a national identity in America and elsewhere.

While artists in Europe had well begun to experiment with the new medium, it was still considered primarily a mechanical craft and an instrument of documentation in America by the late nineteenth century. The most dynamic figure to change this and to establish photography as art in the United States was Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Stieglitz, the child of German parents born in Hoboken, New Jersey, left for Germany in 1881 to study mechanical engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic Institute. His fascination with photography started after he had bought a camera on a whim and begun to work with Hermann Wilhelm Vogel (1834-1898). Vogel was a world-famous photochemist at the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin who worked on the sensitivity of film to light and made major contributions to color photography. He instilled in Stieglitz the ambition for technical excellence and a leaning toward pictorial photography. Pic- torialism demanded images resembling paintings—idealized reflections of the artist’s soul and not the grim details of reality.

Stieglitz found his earliest public recognition in Germany and Britain, where his works were exhibited to a largely enthusiastic audience. Family matters called him back to New York in 1890. After his return he not only discovered the fascination of city subjects, which had been considered too vulgar for art, but also initiated his career as a powerful advocate of creative photography in the line of pictorialism. First he addressed his countrymen as a member of the local camera club, then as editor of several journals, and after a few years in his role as owner of several galleries, where he exhibited photographs by American as well as British, German, and Austrian artists. In 1902 Stieglitz assembled notable American photographers such as Edward Steichen (1879—1973) and Gertrude Kasebier (1851—1934)—who had both spent some time in Germany—in a new association he named the Photo-Secession after the secessionist painters in Germany and Austria who reacted against the established rules of their art.

While the Photo-Secessionists still advocated pictorialism, a few American photographers were fascinated by new ideas discussed in Europe under the term modernism. Though American photographers did not fully adopt the extreme avant-garde imagery, parallels in the photographic gaze on both sides of the Atlantic occurred shortly before and especially after World War I. In the 1920s the pronounced industrial character of society advanced to a subject matter of photography. Similarly, interest grew in geometric and natural forms, visualized close up and in sharp focus to discover new aspects in well-known objects, as in the photographs of the Germans Karl Blossfeldt (1865—1932) and Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897—1966), or the Americans Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976)— the latter had studied photochemistry at the Polytechnic Institute in Dresden. Audiences in Germany and America wanted to see cities, such as New York or Berlin, or automobile or steel plants from a new angle.

In the late 1920s the German artist association Werkbund invited Steichen and Weston to cooperate in the organization of an exhibition to be held in Stuttgart. In the ensuing noteworthy “Film und Foto” exhibition of 1929, all the major figures of art photography in America—with the notable exception of Stieglitz and Paul Strand (1890-1976)—were represented, together with the foremost modernist photographers in Europe. Fleeing Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, the latter were to exert a decisive effect on American art photography.

At the same time, photography started to permeate everyday life even more intrusively. The rise of photojournalism—that is, emotive and easily recognizable imagery produced for printing purposes—ushered in a new era of reportage and news consumption. The breakthrough of photojournalism dates back to the late 1880s, when new techniques—most importantly the halftone process—allowed for mass printing of photos alongside of text. George Eastman had developed a hand-held camera that he had begun to market in 1888. In addition, the previous year two German inventors had found a new and less dangerous compound to be used as a light source, called Blitzlichtpulver (flashlight powder). It was used, for instance, by Jacob Riis (1849—1914), a Danish immigrant, to photograph the living conditions in New York’s Lower East Side, published as Flashes from the Slums in 1888. Improvements such as these enabled photographers to give social issues an even more immediate expression and to bring them home to contemporaries who had previously closed their eyes to them.

The methods and concepts that transformed photojournalism into the genre we know in the twenty-first century originated in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, where the three most-popular papers alone, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), the Munchner Illustrierte Presse (Munich Illustrated News), and the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper), sold 5 million copies a day.

New cameras were devised in that country in mid-decade: the Ernox (later called Ermanox) and the Leica, the latter being the first of the simple, portable, fast cameras with roll film. Its features, including the possibility to shoot continuous exposures, explain its instantaneous adoption by photojournalists all over the world. Layout specialist Stefan Lorant (1901— 1997), later founder of the London-based Picture Post (1938), and photographers like Erich Salomon (1886—1944), who specialized in images of contemporary statesmen debating important political matters; Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995), sometimes called the photojournalist of the twentieth century; and the Hungarian Robert Capa (1913-1954) are among the most famous to have left their mark on the genre. After many of them had fled the National Socialist regime in Europe, they shaped photojournalism in North America. The masterpiece of the magazine genre, Life, founded by Henry R. Luce (1898-1967) in 1936, owed much of its early design and success to German contributors. Photographers such as Eisenstaedt joined the Life team, who alone finally produced over 1,000 feature stories for Luce, while Stefan Lorant moved to the United States in 1940 to be put in charge of the magazine’s design. The transfer of individuals and forms of visualization between Germany and America worked both ways, though World War II interrupted the process. After the war images and techniques began to flood back, particularly to West Germany, where photographers tried to catch up with the progress made elsewhere. Gradually, the pictures produced by photographers accompanying the advancing armies found recognition. Among them are those of Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), the first woman photographer to be hired by a magazine (Life), the first female war photographer, and one of the first to enter the recently liberated concentration camps in Germany and Austria. She and her colleagues produced images of death and destruction that have haunted the public mind ever since.

For the past half century the ambition to produce the permanent image has turned into an undertaking even more heterogeneous and global as far as influences are concerned. Transatlantic transfers between America and Germany will continue to influence photography as a technique, a means of documentation, and an art in both countries. However, the impact will probably not again be as momentous as in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

Angela Schwarz

Photography

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