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unique brand of uncompromising realism in almost a half century's worth of articles, essays, lectures, brochures, and unpublished manuscripts addressing photography, technology, and modernity.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.

Dieser Titel aus dem De Gruyter-Verlagsarchiv ist digitalisiert worden, um ihn der wissenschaftlichen Forschung zuganglich zu machen. Da der Titel erstmals im Nationalsozialismus publiziert wurde, ist er in besonderem Masse in seinem historischen Kontext zu betrachten. Mehr erfahren Sie . >

Fagus is the story of a Gesamtkunstwerk and an early example of corporate identity: the Fagus factory in Alfeld an der Leine, built by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer from 1911, is regarded as the founding structure of modernism. The architects succeeded in giving a medium-sized company a completely unusual face that was anything but traditional. This was possible because the client and architect formed an extraordinarily favorable constellation. The factory owner combined an affinity toward the life reform movement with American corporate philosophy. With its representative objectivity and extensive use of glass, the factory is also an expression of a new entrepreneurial self-confidence and a modern advertising strategy. The avant-garde further influenced the design of the company's machines and its printed matter. The list of collaborators reads like a Who's Who of international modernism: some of Fagus's advertising, for instance, was designed by Johannes Molzahn, Theo von Doesburg, and Herbert Bayer. And with his series of photographs from 1928, the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch created what can today be called a classic image of the Fagus factory and its products.