The Absolute Realist: Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967

342 Pages·2023·30.066 MB·English

by  Albert Renger-Patzsch

© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
The
Absolute
Realist
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images

ii renger-patzsch
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
The
Absolute
Realist
COLLECTED WRITINGS OF
ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCH, 1923–1967
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
DANIEL H. MAGILOW
GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

the absolute realist iii
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images

iv renger-patzsch
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
Contents
viii Acknowledgments
ix Note to the Reader
xi Special Thanks
1 Introduction: Albert Renger-Patzsch, the Absolute Realist
Daniel H. Magilow
37 Published Writings, 1923–1942
39 Plant Photographs (1923)
43 On Photographing Flowers
48 Animal Photos with the Meyer Plasmat
55 Plant Photographs (ca. 1925)
63 The Details along the Way
65 On Photographing Sculptural Artworks
71 Heretical Thoughts on Artistic Photography
77 Winter Photography and Snowshoeing
81 Cactus Photographs
85 Photographs of Children
89 Photographic Studies in the Plant Kingdom
92 The Landscape Photographer in Winter
97 Photography and Art
101 Nature as Artist
104 Aims
107 Some Remarks on Hands and Hand Photographs
109 New Perspectives of the Camera
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
114 Joy before the Object
117 My Book about the Halligen
120 “Hold Still!”: Martin Munkacsi and Albert Renger-Patzsch on
Amateur Photography
126 Some Tips from Renger-Patzsch, Photographer
128 Postscript to Photo-Inflation / Boom Times
131 On Photography’s Essence: From a Letter
134 The Limits of the Photographic
141 The Camera and Landscape Photography
145 Violating the Landscape Is Forbidden
149 Masters of the Camera Tell How: A. Renger-Patzsch
154 Work-Photo
159 Sylt—The Image of an Island: Landscape as Document
166 I Photograph . . .
171 On the Limits of Photography: From Essays by Albert Renger-Patzsch
175 Interlude: The Mystery of Albert Renger-Patzsch, the Third Reich,
and National Socialism
Daniel H. Magilow
191 Published Writings, 1950–1967
193 An Escape from the Chaos: Some Thoughts on the Situation of Photography Today
197 Thoughts on Professional Photography
199 Editorial Note
201 An Attempt to Classify Photography (1953)
205 “It was a glorious time!”
206 An Attempt to Classify Photography (1958)
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
220 Where Does Photography Stand Today?
235 What about Landscape?
237 A Conceptual Definition of “Photography”
239 Architect and Photographer
247 On the Limits of the Trade: Can Photography Represent a Type?
252 The Standard Format of the Future (and “Discouragingly Good!” and
“You’re Not . . . Getting the Picture”)
255 World Exhibition of Photography
259 On Photography’s Significance and the Photographer’s Responsibility
268 A Lecture Never Delivered
273 In memoriam: Albert Renger-Patzsch / The Amateur and the Object
277 Unpublished Writings
278 Editorial Note
279 Some Remarks on Portrait Photography, on Hands and Hand Portraits
282 On the Care of Cacti
285 Mankind—In Technology’s Thrall—Is Destroying His Own Home
290 Expert Witness Opinion
293 Photographs of Spare Parts
296 Photographic Murder
299 Untitled [“That which we call landscape . . .”]
303 Photogenic
306 Untitled [“It’s rare that one can create a completely verisimilar portrait . . .”]
309 On Architectural Photographs
313 Untitled [“Autobiography can only be of general interest . . .”]
317 For Further Reading
319 About the Editor and Translator
320 Index
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
Acknowledgments
This edition would not have been possible without generous financial, intellectual, and emo-
tional support from a wide array of friends, family, colleagues, and institutions.
Two mentors from graduate school deserve thanks for planting the seeds of this edi-
tion in the late 1990s. My lengthy engagement with Albert Renger-Patzsch began when I
was first exposed to him during a graduate seminar on photography and literature at Prince-
ton University taught by Michael W. Jennings. His work and that of another mentor, Barbara
Hahn, on scholarly editions offered paradigms for how and why to take on the often arduous
task of making old texts available to new audiences.
For their research support, I thank the Getty Foundation and the German Academic
Exchange Service, whose grants provided opportunities to research Renger-Patzsch’s life
and work. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, provided a Professional Development
Award and in 2016–2017, a fellowship at the University of Tennessee Humanities Center,
during which I completed much of the work for this edition. Interlibrary Services at the Uni-
versity of Tennessee, Knoxville, helped me track down many of Renger-Patzsch’s writings.
Vera Joris (Fotomuseum Antwerpen), Christine Dürichen (Technische Sammlungen Dres-
den), and Thomas Romándi (Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek der Stadt Köln) also generously
provided copies of some of Renger-Patzsch’s texts. Steven Tribe assisted with procuring
images of early large-format cameras. Getty Publications and its hardworking staff have my
sincere gratitude for undertaking this ambitious project. In particular, I thank Jonathan Smit
for his precise and impressive copy editing.
Several friends and colleagues deserve special thanks for their crucial support for this
project, specifically Andrés Mario Zervigón, Elizabeth Otto, Daniel Purdy, Steffen Siegel,
Lisa Silverman, and Bernd Stiegler.
Finally, thanks are due to my family: my parents, Susan Magilow and Mark Magilow (z”l),
and my brother and sister-in-law Andrew and Stephanie Magilow and their children, Avner
and Madeleine. I am also grateful for the daily, unconditional support I receive from Golda
Magilow-Bryson, but most of all I thank my partner, Megan Bryson. She is both a valuable
interlocutor and the person who makes it all worthwhile, and I dedicate this edition to her.

viii
© J. Paul Getty Trust. See additional copyright notices and illustration captions to confirm copyright information for individual texts and images
Note to the Reader
Throughout his career, Albert Renger-Patzsch remained steadfast in his views about photogra-
phy, and his confident, forceful personality comes through clearly in his essays. While this edition
strives for fidelity to the tone and diction of the original German, and to communicate Renger-
Patzsch’s directness, wittiness, erudition, and even stubbornness, the demands of clarity and
readability have sometimes necessitated slight flexibility with phrasings. Italicized or underlined
words reflect emphasis in Renger-Patzsch’s originals.
Most essays in this edition include brief introductions to provide necessary context. Foot-
noted annotations clarify potentially unclear references. If Renger-Patzsch’s texts included edi-
torial introductions, these are marked with a signature line (for example, “Wilhelm Schöppe, ed.”
or “Eds. of Foto Prisma”). These essays also regularly quote other writers, philosophers, poets,
and photographers, and this edition uses existing English translations of cited texts if available.
Renger-Patzsch’s writings also rely frequently on jargon that lacks direct English equiva-
lents. For instance, he describes the geography of Sylt and the Halligen islands, low-lying tidal
areas off Germany’s North Sea coast, using terms from regional dialect. And because the essays
often appeared in amateur photography magazines in an era of analog photography, Renger-
Patzsch could and did assume that his readers—unlike readers today—would have greater famil-
iarity with specialized vocabularies of photographic optics and chemistry.
Alongside his jargon, Renger-Patzsch’s realist aesthetic (see Introduction) forces translators
to make certain choices. He frequently uses Gegenstand (object), a crucial term for understand-
ing the propensity of Neue Sachlichkeit photography to level vision and objectify the visible
world. Paradoxically, the word might sometimes best be rendered in English as photography’s
“subject” or “subject matter,” but given the term’s conceptual centrality, it has generally been
left as “object.”
Renger-Patzsch’s published writings typically—but not always—appeared alongside his
photographs. Each text in this edition lists the images as they were titled in the first publica-
tion, although sometimes the titles are different than the names under which museums and
collections list them today. For several reasons, however, this edition makes no attempt to com-
prehensively reconstruct the texts with those same photographs. First, many original images
were unavailable because approximately eighteen thousand of Renger-Patzsch’s negatives were
destroyed during Allied bombings of Essen in 1944. Second, even when the original photographs

ix