Erich Hartmann (photographer)

Erich Hartmann (Münich, July 29, 1922 - New York, February 4, 1999) was an american photographer.

Early Days

Erich Hartmann, was born 29 July 1922 in Munich, Germany, the eldest child of parents who actually lived in Passau, a small city on the Danube near the Austrian border in which they were one of a handful of Jewish families. Erich Hartmann's family belonged to the middle-class, and his father, a social-democrat who served during WWI and gained some medals, was highly respected. In 1930, being only eight years-old, Erich took his firsts photographs. [ "In The Camps", W.W. Norton Company]

Life became increasingly difficult after the Nazi takeover in 1933. As strange as it can be, a large majority of these families still didn't understood what was really happening, even while witnessing the increasing number of deportations of Jews in the so-called "labour camp" in the near-by village of Dachau.

In 1938, two days after the assassination, in Paris, of German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath (November 7), Germany was in the grip of skillfully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence. In the early hours of November 10, coordinated destruction broke out in cities, towns and villages throughout the Third Reich. In a single night, Kristallnacht (literally Night of Crystal) saw the destruction of lots of Synagogues, and the ransacking of many Jewish businesses and homes with all the windows systematically broken (hence the expression "crystal"). [ "Kristallnacht"", by Anthony Read, Random House Value Publishing] In August, Erich's family gratefully accepted an opportunity to immigrate to the United States.

First Steps

The only English speaker in the family, Erich Hartmann worked in a textile mill, in Albany, attending evening high school and later taking night courses at Siena College where he gets his Bachelor's degree.On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. entered the war, and Erich enlisted in the US Army. Trained in Virginia and Ohio, he had to wait until 1943 before serving in England, Belgium and France (the Normandy landings), before being assigned as court interpreter at Nazi trials in Cologne, Germany. [ Biography provided by The United World College of the Adriatic.] At the end of the war he moved to New York City where, in 1946, he married Ruth Bains who gave him a son, Nicholas (born in 1952) and a daughter, Celia (born in 1956). During these years, he worked as an assistant to a portrait photographer and then entered the New School for Social Research with Charles Leirens, Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch. In 1950, he became a freelancer portraitist taking pictures of cultural figures such as architect Walter Gropius, writer Arthur Koestler or conductor Leonard Bernstein. Music played a great role in his life and work: "Music captured me before photography did", he recalled. "In my parents' house there was not much music except for a hand-cranked gramophone on which I surreptitiously and repeatedly played a record of arias from "Carmen". This was before I could read!" [ Brochure from "Music Makers" photographic exhibition, The United World College of the Adriatic, Italy, 2000]

In the 1950's Hartmann first became known to the wider public for his poetic approach to science, industry and architecture in a series of photo essays for Fortune Magazine, beginning with "The Deep North", "The Building of Saint Lawrence Seaway" or "Shapes of Sound". He later did similar essays on the poetics of science and technology for French, German and American Geo and other magazines. Throughout his life he traveled widely on assignments for the major magazines of the US, Europe and Japan and for many corporations such as IBM, Nippon Airways, Citroën, Citibank, Boeing, Ford, Schlumberger for which he mainly used color. Invited in l952 to join Magnum Photos, the international photographers’ cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, he was since 1954 for many years on the Board of Directors, becoming President in l985.

Maturity

His first solo exhibition "Sunday With the Bridge", studies of Brooklyn Bridge, opened at the Museum of the City of New York in l956. In 1962, his book and exhibition "Our Daily Bread" turned widely around the United States. Many more exhibits have followed over the years in the United States, in Japan and throughout Europe. He lectured at the Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria, at the Syracuse University School of Journalism, among others, taught at workshops and seminars and was the recipient of many awards and prizes.

His principal interest, in photography as in life, was the way in which people relate both to their natural surroundings and to the environments they create. "Our Daily Bread" and "The World of Work" were continuing long-term projects. He documented not only industry and technology – glass-making, boat-building, farming, food production, aviation, construction, space exploration, scientific research - but also the human cultural and geographical context: Shakespeare’s England, James Joyce’s Dublin or Thomas Mann’s Venice.

His personal projects reveal a fascination with the way technology can embody beauty: the abstract patterns of ink drops in water, intimate portraits of tiny precision-manufactured components or "laser light" in natural and man-made environments: "In the 1970's he became obsessional with laser light", Ruth Hartmann remembers. "He saw there a way to make light truly "write", to "photo" ""graph". He began experimenting with diffusing laser light through different kind of glass, through prisms, lenses of all kinds, through faceted doorknobs, breaking the light into pieces to make designs, to write. He then refined his techniques so as to be able to impose a controlled image of concentrated light on landscapes, then on people. This culminated in a major show in New York and other smaller shows." [ Ruth Hartmann in "Where I was", Fotohof Im Otto Müller Verlag publishing company, Austria, 2000]

One of his most penetrating and poignant work however, explores a vision of the emptiness that can lie within the worlds that human beings make for themselves as exemplified in his photographs in a mannequin factory crowded with insensate yet suffering faces.

This concern with dehumanization led him undertake in his late years a very personal and intimate project which came beyond memory.

Way Back

Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Back home, after a Titanic work: 120 rolls of film, a first selection of 300 photographs and, at the end, after another selection of only 74 negatives, Hartmann was ready for publication. The result consisted of the book and exhibition "In the Camps", published in l995 in four languages and exhibited in more than twenty venues in the US and Europe in the years since: "If I have learned any lesson from having been in the remains of the camps",says Hartmann, "it is that thinking or living for oneself alone has become an unaffordable luxury. Except perhaps in dreams, life no longer takes place on a solitary plane. It is now irrevocably complex, and we, whoever we are, have become intertwined one with the other, whether we like it or not. Acting on that belief may be a more effective tribute to the memory of the dead than mourning alone or vowing that it shall not happen again. And it may also be the most promising way of doing away with the concentration camps. I am not an optimist, but I believe that if we decide that we must link our lives inextricably - that "me" and "them" must be replaced by "us" - we may manage to make a life in which gas chambers will not be used again anywhere and a future in which children, including my granddaughters, will not know what they are." [ Erich Hartmann: "In the Camps"]

In the late 1990s Hartmann began make a definitive selection from fifty years of this personal work, and just a few months before his death he began discussions with a gallery in Austria about developing an exhibition called "Where I Was". He died unexpectedly on 4 February 1999, but his wife decided to continue the task of defining and preparing the pictures, and the show opened at Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg on 27 June 2000:"Different from most posthumous exhibits", writes Ruth Hartmann, "the beginning, the idea and impetus for this came from the photographer himself in his lifetime and has been realized by others attempting to continue the idea in accodance with his notes". [ Few weeks from his death, Erich Hartmann made notes about the topics from his fifty years of work.] "Where I was" was not always a specific geographic spot; it was often a frame of mind, as when he found the mannequin factory and saw there a simple and seemingly innocent metaphor for the dehumanizing horrors of our time. (...) These are personal pictures of a busy working photo-journalist, travelling all the time; home briefly in between. Although much of his assigned work was in color, he was never without a camera loaded with black and white film and a small box of extra rolls, which he used to capture what intrigued and fascinated him always: life in progress, people in their environments, enigmatic, unfinished, ambibuous. His devotion to photography was lifelong and intense; he saw pictures everywhere. Taking these personal pictures kept his own course steady even as he worked, with equal devotion, on widely varying assignments which often bred new passions and fascinations, as evidenced in his involvment with the intricate beauties of technology. Some of these pictures here come from such assignments. He was There, too." [ Ruth Hartmann in "Where I was"]

"I have earned my living as a magazine photographer and photojournalist", says Hartmann, "working in many parts of the world for major magazines and businesses, often on subjects of general interest and most often on topics having to do with high technology. Alongside and intertwined with that photographic life has been another, an exploration mainly of aspects of my middle-class (and now late middle-age) self and some of the forces that had an effect on it. I have chosen autobuiography as main theme of my personal work for more than one reason. I believe that I can speak most convincingly of what I have known the longest if perhaps not the best, I have derived from seemingly everyday aspects of an outwardly quiet and undramatic life an endless and rich source of challenge, and I am tempted to believe that the results resonate beyond the specific and personal and speak for other lives as well." [ Erich Hartmann's text in "Where I was"]

Exhibitions

* 2005 "Writing with Light" - Artefact Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
* 2007 "Music Makers" - United World College of the Adriatic, Duino, Italy
* 2005 "Dublin 1964" - "Memphis in May" - Robinson Gallery Memphis, Tennessee, USA
* 2004 "Dublin 1964" - Gallery of Photography, Dublin, Ireland
* 2004 "Security, Privilege and Freedom: A Transatlantic Crossing on Queen Elizabeth South Street", Seaport Museum, New York, USA
* 2000/02 "Where I Was" - Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria; Leica Gallery, New York, USA; Sankt Anna Kapelle, Passau, Germany; Jewish Museum, Munich, Germany; Leica Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
* 1995/00 "In the Camps", Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France; Goethe House, New York, USA; Leica Gallery, New York, USA; NGBK Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany; St. Anna Kapelle, Passau, Germany; National Monument , Camp Vught, Netherlands; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy ; Villa Cian, Spilimbergo, Italy; Sala San Leonardo, Venice, Italy and other venues in US and Europe
* 1991 "High Technology" - shown in Berlin and Bonn in Germany and at other venues in Europe
* 1989 "Musicians at Work" - Lockenhaus Music Festival, Austria
* 1988 "Veritas" - Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, USA
* 1987 "Washington" - Magnum Gallery, Paris, France
* 1985 "The Heart of Technology" - Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Tokyo
* 1984 "Erich Hartmann Slept Here" - Residenz Gallery, Salzburg
* 1983 "Macroworld" - Olympus Galleries in Paris, Hamburg, Tokyo, London
* 1982 "Train Journey" - French Cultural Institute, New York ;numerous other venues in the U.S. ; Paris, Tokyo, Hamburg
* 1982 "Europe in Space" - The Photographers' Gallery, London. UK;
* 1978 "A Play of Light" - Neikrug Gallery, New York, USA
* 1977 "Photographs with a Laser" - AIGA Gallery, New York, USA ; Fiolet Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
* 1976 "Carnet de Route & Natures Mortes" - Photogalerie, Paris, France
* 1971 "Mannequin Factory" - Underground Gallery, New York, USA; Fiolet Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands;
* 1962 "Our Daily Bread" - The Coliseum, New York, USA; Department of Agriculture, Washington D.C., USA; numerous other venues in the US
* 1956 "Sunday with the Bridge" - Museum of the City of New York, USA; Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA

Awards

* Photokina Award, Cologne, Germany
* International Award from Centro di Ricerca e Archiviazione della Fotografia, Spilimbergo, Italy
* The Newhouse Medal from Syracuse University
* The Art Director’s Club Prize

Books

* 2000 "Where I Was", Otto Muller Verlag, Austria
* 1995 "In The Camps", W.W. Norton Company USA; UK; "Dans le silence des camps", La Martinière, France; "Stumme Zeugen : Photographien aus konzentrazionslagern", Lambert Schneider, Germany; "Il Silenzio dei campi", Contrasto, Italy
* 1972 "Space: Focus Earth", The European Space Research Organization and Arcade, USA; L'Europe des satellites, hommes et techniques, Arcade, France
* 1965 "About OXO", Spectator Publications, USA

References

External links

* [http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.AgencyHome_VPage&pid=2K7O3R1VX08V Erich Hartmann's Photographies on Magnum Agency website]
* [http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R13N7_0&nm=Erich%20Hartmann Erich Hartmann's Photographies from: Europe 1979, Trains, Journeys; In the Heart of Technology; Our Daily Bread; Where I was et In the Camps on Magnum Agency website]