Germany

Biography: City Life / Street photographer Herbert Dombrowski

Biography: City Life / Street photographer Herbert Dombrowski

Herbert Dombrowski (1917-2010) was a German photographer. Dombrowski was born in Hamburg in 1917 and began to take pictures as a high-school student. He was 19 when he went to the Hamburg port at night to photograph the SS St. Louis. The image, taken with a used Leica camera, was published on the cover of Reclams Universum, a popular illustrated…
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style,…
Biography: Experimental photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke

Biography: Experimental photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke

Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898–1983) was a German experimental photographer who co-founded the Fotoform group with Otto Steinert. Heinz Hajek-Halke, born in Berlin in 1898, spent part of his childhood in Argentina. He worked as a photo editor, press photographer and commercial artist, concentrating almost from the start on montage techniques. During World War II he lived quietly and photographed small animal…
Interview with Architecture photographer Wolfgang Mothes

Interview with Architecture photographer Wolfgang Mothes

Wolfgang Mothes is a self-taught photographer living in Frankfurt/Germany. Architecture photography has always been his favorite subject, but he is much interested in other genres of photography as well, especially panorama, technology and infrared. Wolfgang Mothes work has been exhibited in Germany, GB, Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary and Russia. He works for magazines, published three books and many calendars. He still…
Biography: Fashion photographer Willy Maywald

Biography: Fashion photographer Willy Maywald

Willy Maywald was born in Kleve in the Lower Rhine region in 1907, he attended the schools of applied arts in Krefeld, Cologne, and Berlin which shaped his avant-garde style. In 1932 he moved to the city on the Seine, where he befriended many of the protagonists of modern art. The bustling arts scene of Paris offered him many different…
Biography: Documentary/Architecture photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

Biography: Documentary/Architecture photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures. To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures, such as the winding towers that haul coal and iron ore…
Vintage: Altstadt, Dresden, Saxony, Germany in the late 19th Century

Vintage: Altstadt, Dresden, Saxony, Germany in the late 19th Century

The city of Dresden had a distinctive silhouette, captured in famous paintings by Bernardo Bellotto and by Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl. Between 1806 and 1918 the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony (which was a part of the German Empire from 1871). During the Napoleonic Wars the French emperor made it a base of operations, winning…
August Sander – A view of the collection: Westerwald. Portraits and Landscapes

August Sander – A view of the collection: Westerwald. Portraits and Landscapes

Soon after August Sander (1876-1964) set up his studio in Cologne-Lindenthal in 1910, he found himself drawn again and again to the nearby Westerwald region. Sander photographed many families there over four decades, producing remarkable group and individual portraits as well as characteristic views of the landscape. The works on view in the exhibition convey an impression of this special…
Interview with Architecture photographer Frank Machalowski

Interview with Architecture photographer Frank Machalowski

My name is Frank Machalowski, I was born in Berlin, Germany. I live and work here. After studying economy in Berlin I worked for 14 years as a business consultant, almost 3 years ago I started my own business as a freelance photographer and artist. How and when did you become interested in photography? When I was a little child,…
Nicholas Nixon: THE BROWN SISTERS. 40 YEARS

Nicholas Nixon: THE BROWN SISTERS. 40 YEARS

Every year since 1975, American photographer Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947) has taken a portrait of his wife Bebe and her three sisters. The requirements for this unusual, long-term artistic project are extremely simple: The four women reunite for a group portrait, with the only constants being the order in which they appear left to right and the size of the…
Abbas: Between Myth and Ideology

Abbas: Between Myth and Ideology

The Iranian-French photographer Abbas (*1944) took religion as his main concern. He shot the Iranian Revolution, documented Islam as a gobal phenomenon, including militant Islamism. To be able to document the everyday life of Muslims, he travelled from Xinjiang to Morocco, from London to Timbuktu, New York and Mecca. He photographed their rituals, their spirituality, and also their growing radicalisation.…
Biography: Herbert List

Biography: Herbert List

Herbert List (October 7, 1903–April 4, 1975) was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. Herbert List was a classically educated artist who combined a love of photography with a fascination for surrealism and classicism. Born into a prosperous Hamburg merchant family, List began an apprenticeship at a…
Helmut Newton: Permanent Loan Selection

Helmut Newton: Permanent Loan Selection

When Helmut Newton established his foundation in the fall of 2003, he donated several hundred original photographs as a permanent loan which have been preserved by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. For its tenth anniversary, the Helmut Newton Foundation is now premiering around 200 of these photographs, under the title “Permanent Loan Selection.” These prints, mainly never before shown in Berlin,…
Biography: Portrait photographer Adolph de Meyer

Biography: Portrait photographer Adolph de Meyer

Adolph de Meyer (1st September 1868 – 6 January 1946) was a photographer famed for his elegant photographic portraits in the early 20th century. He was also the first official fashion photographer for the American magazine Vogue, appointed to that position in 1913. Although de Meyer habitually fictionalized his biographical information, it is fairly certain that he was educated in…
Interview with Black and White Street photographer Andreas Trogisch

Interview with Black and White Street photographer Andreas Trogisch

Andreas Trogisch was born in 1959 in Riesa (Germany). He lives and works as graphic designer and photographer in Berlin. 1. How and when did you become interested in photography? I have been interested in photography “forever” – at least since I began to buying and reading the East German “fotografie” magazine in 1977 or so. In 1982, I began…
Biography: Portrait photographer August Sander

Biography: Portrait photographer August Sander

August Sander (1876 – 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. August Sander set for himself a problem that ranks among the most ambitious in the history of photography: He assigned himself the project of making a photographic portrait of the German people. He set about his task as systematically as a taxonomist, gathering, specimen by specimen, exemplary players…
Biography: Fashion/Nude photographer Helmut Newton

Biography: Fashion/Nude photographer Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton (1920 – 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. He was a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.” Newton led the ultimate glamorous life. He lived in the Chateau Marmont in the winter months, to keep the cold and gloom at bay, befriending Billy Wilder, Dennis Hopper…
Biography: Fashion photographer Horst P. Horst

Biography: Fashion photographer Horst P. Horst

Horst P. Horst (August 14, 1906 – November 18, 1999) was a German-American fashion photographer. The first pictures that carried a Horst credit line appeared in the December 1931 issue of French Vogue. It was a full-page advertisement showing a model in black velvet holding a Klytia scent bottle in one hand with the other hand raised elegantly above it……