*GERMAINE KRULL* (ALEMANIA, 1897-1985)

Germaine Krull (29 November 1897 – 31 July 1985), was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner.Her nationality has been categorized as German, Polish, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as "an especially outspoken example" of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who "could lead lives free from convention," she is best known for photographically-illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.


Germaine Luise Krull was born in Wilda, Poznań, then on the border between Germany and Poland in East Prussia, of an affluent German family. In her early years, the family moved around Europe frequently; she did not receive a formal education, but instead received homeschooling from her father, an accomplished engineer and a free thinker but a bit of a neer-do-well. Her father may have influenced her in at least two ways. First, he let her dress as a boy when she was young, which may have contributed to her ideas about women's roles later in her life.Second, his views on social justice "also seem to have predisposed her to involvement with radical politics".
Between 1915 and 1917 or 1918 she attended the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie, a photography school in Munich, Germany, at which Frank Eugene's teaching of pictorialism in 1907-1913 had been influential.She opened a studio in Munich in approximately 1918, took portraits of Kurt Eisner and others, and befriended prominent people such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Pollock, and Max Horkheimer.


Krull was politically active between 1918 and 1921. In 1919 she switched from the Independent Socialist Party of Bavaria to the Communist Party of Germany, and was arrested and imprisoned for assisting a Bolshevik emissary's attempted escape to Austria. She was expelled from Bavaria in 1920 for her Communist activities, and traveled to Russia with lover Samuel Levit. After Levit abandoned her in 1921, Krull was imprisoned as an "anti-Bolshevik" and expelled from Russia.


She lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1925 where she resumed her photographic career. She and Kurt Hübschmann (later to be known as Kurt Hutton) worked together in a Berlin studio between 1922 and 1924. Among other photographs Krull produced in Berlin were nudes that one reviewer has likened to "satires of lesbian pornography".


Having met Dutch filmmaker and communist Joris Ivens in 1923, she moved to Amsterdam in 1925.[1]:40-43 After Krull returned to Paris in 1926, Ivens and Krull entered into a marriage of convenience between 1927 and 1943 so that Krull could hold a Dutch passport and could have a "veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy".

In Paris between 1926 and 1928, Krull became friends with Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Eli Lotar, André Malraux, Colette, Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide and others; her commercial work consisted of fashion photography, nudes, and portraits.[1]:83-89 During this period she published the portfolio Métal (1928) which concerned "the essentially masculine subject of the industrial landscape". Krull shot the portfolio's 64 black-and-white photographs in Paris, Marseille, and Holland during approximately the same period as Ivens was creating his film De Brug ("The Bridge") in Rotterdam, and the two artists may have influenced each other. The portfolio's subjects range from bridges, buildings (e.g., the Eiffel Tower), and ships to bicycle wheels; it can be read as either a celebration of machines or a criticism of them.Many of the photographs were taken from dramatic angles, and overall the work has been compared to that of László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko.In 1999-2004 the portfolio was selected as one of the most important photobooks in history.

By 1928 Krull was considered one of the best photographers in Paris, along with André Kertész and Man Ray.Between 1928 and 1933, her photographic work consisted primarily of photojournalism, such as her photographs for Vu, a French magazine, also in the early 1930s,she also made a pioneering study of employment black spots in Britain for Weekly Illustrated (most of her ground-breaking reportage work from this period remains immured in press archives and she has never received the credit which is her due for this work).Her book Études de Nu ("Studies of Nudes") published in 1930 is still well-known today. Between 1930 and 1935 she contributed photographs for a number of travel and detective fiction books.


In 1935-1940, Krull lived in Monte Carlo where she had a photographic studio. Among her subjects during this period were buildings (such as casinos and palaces), automobiles, celebrities, and common people.She may have been a member of the Black Star photojournalism agency which had been founded in 1935, but "no trace of her work appears in the press with that label".
In World War II, she became disenchanted with the Vichy France government, and sought to join the Free French Forces in Africa.Due to her Dutch passport and her need to obtain proper visas, her journey to Africa included over a year (1941–1942) in Brazil where she photographed the city of Ouro Preto. Between 1942 and 1944 she was in Brazzaville in Republic of the Congo, after which she spent several months in Algiers and then returned to France.

After World War II, she traveled to Southeast Asia as a war correspondent, but by 1946 had become a co-owner of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, a role that she undertook until 1966.She published three books with photographs during this period, and also collaborated with Malraux on a project concerning the sculpture and architecture of Southeast Asia.
After retiring from the hotel business in 1966, she briefly lived near Paris, then moved to Northern India and converted to the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Her final major photographic project was the publication of a 1968 book Tibetans in India that included a portrait of the Dalai Lama. After a stroke, she moved to a nursing home in Wetzlar, Germany, where she died in 1985.

*HERBERT TOBIAS* (ALEMANIA, 1924-1982)

Herbert Tobias es uno de los fotógrafos alemanes más importantes del período posterior a la guerra. La primera vez que se hizo conocido por sus fotografías de moda no convencional fue en París y Berlín en la década de 1950 y 60. Hoy en día, es famoso sobre todo por sus fotografías de paisajes urbanos atmosféricos, sus retratos y sus sutiles imágenes eróticas de hombres.

Sus fotografías están llenas de poesía, la sensualidad y de poder sugestivo.

La fotografía de moda glamorosa de Tobías y sus retratos impresionantes de los jóvenes Klaus Kinski, Zarah Leander e icónicos como Velvet Underground son ampliamente conocidos en la actualidad. Sin embargo, su nombre ha sido olvidado.

Herbert Tobias is born in Dessau in 1924. He grows up in a petit bourgeois household and begins taking photographs as a child. His aim of becoming an actor remains unfulfilled after the early death of his father in 1936. He completes an apprenticeship as a landscape surveyor instead and is called up to national service in 1942. Initial photographs of stunning artistic maturity are taken on the eastern front during World War II.

After the war, Tobias spends a year at drama school and subsequently meanders across provincial Germany with a touring theatre company.

He comes out in the late forties. In 1951, he moves to Paris with his boyfriend, where he occasionally works for the famous fashion photographer Willy Maywald and publishes his own photographs for the first time. His win in the Frankfurter Illustrierte cover page contest suddenly makes him famous. He moves to Berlin in 1954, where he spends the most successful years of his career. Tobias works for renowned fashion labels and various magazines. He also completes many independent assignments, including cityscapes, celebrity portraits and, above all, photographs of men.

At the peak of his career he goes off the rails, tries himself again as an actor and singer, but virtually loses all touch with society due to his unsteady, erotomanic life style that is filled with excessive drug abuse. He goes to Hamburg in 1969, designs record sleeves for various music labels and works for gay magazines. An exhibition in the Galerie Nagel in Berlin in 1981, for which Tobias re-prints the photographs he took in the fifties and sixties, ushers in the photographer’s rediscovery. He is unable to complete a planned and far advanced project for a book. In August 1982, he dies of Aids in Hamburg.


http://www.herberttobias.com/

*GERHARD RIEBICKE* (ALEMANIA, 1878-1957)

Gerhard Riebicke (Alemania, 1878-1957). Llegó tarde al mundo de la fotografía de desnudos, autodidácta desde 1918, fue deportista y fotógrafo de prensa. Luego en los años veinte se contacta con la idea del movimiento de los deportistas al desnudo. Así documentó junto con Adolf Koch su "Schule für Körperbildung und Nacktkultur".
En 1925 trabaja con Helmy Hurt en la película de cultura física de Richard Oswald "Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit".

En 1929 expone en Berlín, "Film und Foto".

Con el bombardeo a Berlín durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial se destruyeron gran parte de sus trabajos.

- TRASLATION -

Gerhard Riebicke (Germany, 1878-1957). He arrived late to the world of nude photography, self taught since 1918, was an athlete and press photographer. Then in the twenties is contacted with the idea of the movement of athletes in the nude. So along with Adolf Koch documented his "für Schule und Nacktkultur Körperbildung.
In 1925 works with Helmy Hurt in the film by Richard Oswald physical culture "Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit."

In 1929 out in Berlin, "Film und Foto."

With the bombing of Berlin during World War II destroyed much of their work.


The nudists and their documentary

GLEMO

Already in 1853 founded the Swiss Arnold Rikli a so-called "sun hospital" in which he prescribed to his patients' light baths. In Germany, the movement of nudism came later, in the first years of the 20th Century on. The underlying idea was primarily a natural way of life for health. The nudism had no sexual component. In fact, distanced themselves from the followers deliberately pornographic and sexual. It was mainly at the skin-air contact, which was considered to be very healthy for the physical training outdoors without clothes, because you could see certain posture in this way immediately and correct and to the relationship of man with nature. The naked as it were understood at that time was the nudists, naked in one, not a Ausgezogensein as it is understood today. The real difference was just the not-yet-being attracted and therefore completely natural and free in dealing with the body.

Some artists were members of the movement and their works were also documentary of nudism. One of the most famous living reformer and nudism-trailer was the painter and illustrator Fidus (real name Hugo Höppe), whose most famous work, "Light Prayer", which shows a the sun-worshiping young man on a mountain top, much to the artistic expression of the life reform in all its many facets contributed. The real medium of the nudist movement was, however, the nude and probably the most talented photographers in this genre of his time was Gerhard Riebicke.
This, now largely unknown, employed photographer, first with the image of sports scenes, and later, that is the mid-20s, he devoted himself to the representation of the Nacktsportes, especially by dancers and gymnasts, but finally he found on that form of nudism, which also included the "normal" person could participate, which was not formed athletic. The effect of Riebicke photographed models, looking at the pictures today, remarkably at ease and free in dealing with their bodies and the camera. Even in the highly staged pictures are incredible naturalness and subtle humor to be found. The God-or natural beauty and grace of the people on Riebicke images does so obvious that one wonders where there are such people today. Does it exist yet? Or is the now-human by the flooding with a permanently present, unnatural and vulgar erotically charged images glut already so overwrought and dull one hand, the other that he has the natural attitude, lost in the particular naked? People today are so full of images that, once they move out to start a self, they should show the "right" light. They plan their impact on the world accurately, pierced and tattooed their bodies, without this having any traditional background (as with the people who do that have been around years ago), purely in terms of their, often erotic unintended, effects on other.

*ANDREAS FEININGER* (ALEMANIA, 1906-1999)

Andreas Feininger (27 de diciembre de 1906 - 18 de febrero de 1999), fotógrafo norteamericano de origen alemán, que fue alumno y profesor de la prestigiosa Escuela de la Bauhaus de la Alemania de entreguerras. Su padre era Lyonel Feininger, uno de los profesores de dicha escuela y pintor vanguardista relacionado con el expresionismo.

Criado y educado en Europa, donde estudió en la Bauhaus de Weimar y en la escuela de arquitectura de Zerbst, comenzó a trabajar como arquitecto antes de dedicarse a la fotografía. En 1930 hizo sus primeras publicaciones fotográficas y en 1932 se trasladó a París donde estuvo trabajando con el arquitecto suizo Le Corbusier. Después inició un negocio de fotografía industrial y de arquitectura en Estocolmo, pero con la ascensión de Hitler al poder y la extensión de la guerra por Europa emigró a Estados Unidos en 1939, donde trabajó para la revista Life y produjo sus primeras imágenes exitosas, en ese momento centradas en la vida urbana de Nueva York.

En el año 1998, un año antes de su muerte, recibió el Premio de cultura de la asociación alemana de fotografía, uno de los más importantes de Alemania y que han recibido otros fotógrafos internacionales como Man Ray o Henri Cartier-Bresson.

- TRASLATION -

Andreas Bernhard Lyonel Feininger (27 December 1906 - 18 February 1999) was a German American photographer, and writer on photographic technique, noted for his dynamic black-and-white scenes of Manhattan and studies of the structure of natural objects.


Feininger was born in Paris, France, to an American family of German origin. His father, painter Lyonel Feininger, was born in New York City, in 1871.

His great-grandfather emigrated from Durlach, Baden, in Germany, to the United States in 1848.

Feininger grew up and was educated as an architect in Germany, where his father painted and taught at Staatliches Bauhaus. In 1936, he gave up architecture itself, moved to Sweden, and focused on photography. In advance of World War II, in 1939, Feininger immigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a freelance photographer and in 1943 joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962.

Feininger became famous for his photographs of New York. Science and nature, as seen in bones, shells, plants and minerals, were other frequent subjects, but rarely did he photograph people or make portraits. Feininger wrote comprehensive manuals about photography, of which the best known is The Complete Photographer. In the introduction to one of Feininger's books of photographs, Ralph Hattersley described him as "one of the great architects who helped create photography as we know it today." In 1966, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) awarded Feininger its highest distinction, the Robert Leavitt Award. In 1991, the International Center of Photography awarded Feininger the Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award.

Today, Feininger's photographs are in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.


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http://www.andreasfeiningerarchive.com/

http://www.geh.org/fm/feininger/htmlsrc/feinintro.html

- Video BBC series 1983 Master Photographers -