Albert Renger-Patzsch - Böcker

This annotated anthology presents the first English translation of German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch's collected writings. A towering figure in the history of photography, Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) has come to epitomize New Objectivity, the neorealist movement in modernist literature, film, and the visual arts recognized as the signature artistic style of Germany's Weimar Republic. Today, his images are regularly exhibited and widely considered key influences on contemporary photographers. Whether they capture geometrically intricate cacti, flooded tidal landscapes, stacks of raw materials, or imposing blast furnace towers, Renger-Patzsch's photographs embody what his peer Hugo Sieker termed "absolute realism," an approach predicated upon the idea that photographers have one task: to exploit the camera's unique capacity to document with uncompromising detail. Not only a photographer, Renger-Patzsch was also an influential and lucid writer who advocated his unique brand of uncompromising realism in almost a half century's worth of articles, essays, lectures, brochures, and unpublished manuscripts addressing photography, technology, and modernity. Drawing on his papers at the Getty Research Institute and other archives, The Absolute Realist unites in one volume this skillful photographer's ideas about the defining visual medium of modernity.

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more here.