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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
ZILLE
HEINRICH
Chapter 11
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1898
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Heinrich Zille
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The Wood Gatherers
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Lumber Sale in
Crunewald
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Heinrich Zille, the
well-known graphic artist who depicted proletarian conditions of life
around 1900, was also a photographer, but his camera work was not discovered
until the mid-1960s. His ceuvre of more than 400 photographs is now
appreciated as an important contribution to modern photography.
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Autumn in Charlottenburg, a small
town outside Berlin. Two women, possibly mother and daughter, are pulling
a cart loaded high with brush-wood across the sandy ground typical of the
region, one woman with the right hand, the other with the left clasped
around the shafts of the simple vehicle whose left wheel seems to be set
none too surely on its axle. The two wood gatherers have in addition yoked
themselves with a shoulder band to distribute the load and are literally
putting themselves in harness to bring their harvest home quickly. Home -
it may be Charlottenburg itself- whose western outskirts are recognizable
to the left in the picture as a lightly sloping stripe between the grassy
fields and the sky. In 1900, the city with its approximately 190,000
inhabitants is still an independent community; it will not be incorporated
into Greater Berlin for another two decades.
The two wood gatherers have
already put a few kilometers between themselves and the forest of
Grunewald. Their clothing, consisting of skirt, blouse, and apron,
indicates their status as peasants. "In Grunewald, in Grunewald there's a
wood auction" -the popular old street ditty looks back to the days when
the forest, then located far to the west of Berlin, was an important
source of natural raw materials for working-class families. Wood was used
not only for heating, but also in cooking stoves, for which brushwood and
sticks were the cheapest form of fuel - as dramatized by the important
role such wood plays in Gerhard Hauptmann's comedy The Beaver Pelt.
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Rudolf Heinrich
Zille
(January 10, 1858 - August 9, 1929)
The Wood Gatherers
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Eyes to the ground and swinging
their arms
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Although they constitute the
central theme of the picture, which presumably was taken in 1898, the two
women are not the only persons in the oblong-format photograph. Between
the smaller woman in the background and the wagon with its high load we
recognize, half hidden, a baby carriage typical of the times, which is
also loaded with wood and a jute sack. And yet a further person intrudes
into the picture: the photographer himself, whose long shadow stands out
clearly in the bottom right against the bright dune. Somewhere in the
background, but not visible in this photograph, there must be the Ringbahn,
or circular railway around the city, which in those days more or less
functioned as the boundary between city and countryside, that is, between
Charlottenburg and Grunewald. Somewhat further to the right, one can
imagine today's radio tower and the Berlin exhibition centre. The goal of
the two women may well be the Knobelsdorff Bridge. From this point the
path leads across the track into the western end of Charlottenburg. It is
evident that the photographer is wearing a hat, but whether or not he is
using a camera stand for his work cannot be determined. What is certain is
that he is looking eastward; the sun must therefore be standing in the
west, indicating that the time of the photograph is late afternoon or
early evening. The two women are thus making their way back from a daytime
outing, which indicates the completely legal nature of their undertaking.
In reality, women collecting wood must have been a part of daily life in
western Berlin, a situation which explains why none of the court or
amateur photographers active in or around the Reich's capital hit upon the
idea of capturing a scene such as this, without at least an attempt at
idealizing the 'simple life'. But in this picture, there is no trace of
romanticism. The women are pulling with their full strength against the
harness to keep the wagon rolling, and in the process are swinging their
free arms strongly, their eyes to the ground.
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Rudolf Heinrich
Zille
(January 10, 1858 - August 9, 1929)
The Wood Gatherers.
Third series from The Wood Gatherers.
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Max Liebermann as engaged
patron and friend
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Heinrich Zille was neither a
professional photographer nor an amateur in the sense of being merely a
hobby photographer with artistic pretensions, a type that was occasioning
much international discussion around 1900. Born in 1858 in Radeburg in
Saxony, Zille was primarily a graphic artist known for his tragicomic
sketches of simple people. His work appeared
in various magazines and
newspapers beginning in 1903, and five years later, was also published in
book form. Zilie had already achieved popu-larity within his own lifetime
- but his was a controversial fame. Kaiser Wilhelm II, for example,
discredited Zille's work, oriented as it was toward the naturalism of the
age, as "gutter art." The Berlin Secessionists on the other hand valued
his drawing. Particularly in Max Liebermann the train-ed lithographer
found both a prominent and engaged patron and friend. Zille never made a
secret of his photographic activity; at the same time, he did not
emphasize it. Like many artists of the turn of the century - Stuck,
Lenbach, and Munch are perhaps the best known - Zille also drew from
photographs that he had taken himself. Unlike his famous colleagues,
however, he seems to have followed this practice, commonly employed by
painters and graphic artists of the day, rather rarely. Also of note are
the intimacy of Zille's gaze, his particular mode of perception, and his
joy in experimentation, all of which are far removed from any kind of
commercial photography. One may rest assured that for Zille, the camera
served primarily as a means to assimilate reality in a new way. His
contemporaries were aware of Heinrich Zille's work with the camera.
Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1929, this aspect of his work
had sunk into oblivion. Not until 1966 was a cache of somewhat more than
four hundred glass negatives and approximately one hundred twenty
ori¬ginal prints discovered in his estate, out of which a selection was
offered to the public for view for the first time by the Berlin Theater
critic Friedrich Luft in 1967. The legacy indicates that after 1882,
Heinrich Zille photographed exclusively with large-format glass-plate
cameras which he may have borrowed from the Photographic Society, his
employer of at the time. Surviving are also 4 3/4 x 6 1/4, 51/2 x 7-inch,
and 7 x 91/2-inch negatives, along with positives in the form of contact
prints.
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Rudolf Heinrich
Zille
(January 10, 1858 - August 9, 1929)
The Wood Gatherers.
Woman with child pushing a pram loaded with brushwood, with Knobek dorff
Bridge in the background.
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Interest in banal, everyday
life
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The spectrum of Zille's themes was
remarkably broad, even if the majority of his ceuvre, which was largely
concerned with the realities of daily life among the simple working class,
consists of views of old Berlin - rear courtyards, alleys, narrow houses
reached by high staircases, shops and stores. In addition, Zille's legacy
contains portraits and self-portraits, family pictures, nudes, scenes of
fairgrounds and beaches, and - oddly enough - trash dumps, which Zille
photographed a number of times.
Practically absent in Zille's work
are panoramic views of the quickly growing Wilhelmine Berlin, such as
those produced by contemporary photographers such as Max Missmann,
Waldemar Titzenthaler, and Hermann Ruckwardt. Similarly, photographs of
the German Reichstag, the Victory Column, or the Brandenburg Gate
constitute the exception in an ceuvre centered on paradigms of daily life.
In keeping with his interest in
banal, everyday life, Zille often made wood-gathering women the object of
his lens. All in all, it Is possible to distinguish four cycles, in the
first o which, taken in 1897, Zille would still have had to combat the
inconveniences that were a part of short-exposure photography. The
pictures are not sharp, and the framing unsatisfactory - or the women are
looking toward the camera, a circumstance that Zille, who strove for
'discretion', always sought to avoid. In this area, Zille, still very much
the amateur, worked to refine his techniques, rubbing his nose in his
chosen theme, which clearly interested him until 1898. Precisely why Zille
specifically made the theme of daily female labor the center of his cycle,
we don't know. One thing is certain: the wood gatherers had become a more
or less daily sight for Zille after he moved from Rummelsburg to
Sophie-Charlotte Street in 1892, where such women passed every evening on
their way back from collecting wood. "A tranquil peace settled on the
street," according to Zille's son Hans, describing his parents' new
apartment. "From the apartment windows, one's gaze ranged into the open
land. On the other side of the street, the sandy soil was cultivated; in
the middle, there was a large area for drying laundry that was ringed with
bushes and trees. Behind the Ringbahn stretched fallow land, partially
covered with low-growing pines, and finally came the first trees of the
Crunewald and the outskirts of the suburban villas of the West End."
From the open window of his
apartment, Heinrich Zille had photographed the grounds of the Ringbahn
with the Knobelsdorff Bridge to the southwest as early as 1893. Four years
later, he went out into the fields and turned his camera onto the women
returning home from picking wood, almost as if looking over the same scene
from the other direction. Only a few pictures show them at rest. All his
later pictures also avoided the direct gaze into the camera. Zille
photographed the women from behind, thus making them 'faceless' but
lifting their personal trials and tribulations onto the level of a
generalizable condition.
That Heinrich Zille used the photographs from his series on wood gatherers
as illustration models does not diminish their value as independent
artistic achievements. Already in 1903, his drawing Wunsche (Wishes)
appeared in Simplizissimus, which an editor, referring to Zille's origin,
probably supplied with a text in pseudo-Saxon dialect: "If ony I hadda won
big time, jist oncet! I woulda had myself a fine cart and then I coulda
carried that brush wood back home right comfortable." Today, the
completely unsentimental directness of the photograph lends it
credibility, in contrast to the drawing. Zille's radical gaze bluntly
captures the essential, and he intuitively applies photography in terms of
its intrinsic characteristics. Decades before the proclamation of the New
Objectivity, Heinrich Zille was pursuing the idea of photography as
unembellished documentation with his Wood Gatherers. In this sense, he is
properly seen as an ancestor of the modern spirit in photography.
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Mein Photo-Milljoh: the book
publication edited 1967 by the Berlin theater critic Friedrich Luft first
drew attention to Heinrich Zille as a photographer.
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Mein Photo-Milljoh: the book
publication edited 1967 by the Berlin theater critic Friedrich Luft first
drew attention to Heinrich Zille as a photographer.
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