Albert Renger-Patzch: Photographer of Objectivity [Hardcover]

Ann Wilde (Editor), Jürgen Wilde (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 1997

with text by Thomas Janzon Albert Renger-Patzsch, together with August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt, was one of the undisputed pioneers of twentieth-century German photography. Indeed, what Sander achieved in portrait photography and Blossfeldt in plant photography, Renger-Patzsch achieved in his renderings of objects and the material world. As a protagonist of the movement that came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), he wanted to record, phenomenologically as it were, the exact appearance of objects -- their form, material, and surface. Thus he rejected any kind of artistic claim for himself. Believing that the photographer should strive to capture the "essence of the object," he called for documentation rather than art.Renger-Patzsch's most famous work was the 1928 photo album Die Welt ist SchÃn (The World Is Beautiful), a catalog of objects that became one of the most influential photography books ever published. His cool and clinical photographs, with their details of technical apparatus, industrial products, and natural organisms, were models of a new kind of artistic vision.This book contains not only the canonical "Icons of New Objectivity" series -- the famous still lifes of Jena glassware, rows of flatirons at a shoe factory, industrial objects, and more -- but also Renger-Patzsch's lesser-known but no less engaging photographs of landscapes, architecture, urban scenes, and studies of trees and stones. The book also contains a biography, a bibliography, critical commentary by Thomas Janzon, and selected writings of Renger-Patzsch appearing in English for the first time.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"... this collection of 113 black-and-white images from the 1920's to the 60's makes clear just what the movement called New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in photography was all about. Renger-Patzsch, who was the movement's leading practitioner, embraced modern industrialism with all his heart, photographing trains, machines, quarries, and slag heaps with the same admiring precision that he applied to cathedrals, snow-covered landscapes and medieval castles." -- The New York Times Book Review, December 6, 1998

...this collection of 113 black-and-white images from the 1920's to the 60's makes clear just what the movement called New Objectivity in photography was all about. -- The New York Times Book Review, Andy Grundberg

About the Author

Jurgen Wilde is curator of the Karl Blossfeldt Archive.

Jurgen Wilde is curator of the Karl Blossfeldt Archive.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (December 29, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262181894
• ISBN-13: 978-0262181891
• Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 10 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #335,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the world's great photographers., August 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Albert Renger-Patzch: Photographer of Objectivity (Hardcover)

The great German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, who first came to prominence in the 1920s, here receives a first-rate presentation worthy of his stature. The self-professed striving for "objectivity" in Renger-Patzsch's work leads, seemingly paradoxically, to a poetic intensity only achievable by a master artist. Readers of The New Yorker may have seen, in a recent issue, a stunning photo of a snowy field broken by fencing -- that was a Renger-Patzsch, and they will want to check this book out. But everyone should. The reproductions are superb and the supporting scholarly materials are extremely informative.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Objectivity or Idealism?, August 2, 2002

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Interplanetary Funksmanship "Swift lippin', e... (Vanilla Suburbs, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Albert Renger-Patzch: Photographer of Objectivity (Hardcover)

German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch insisted that his photography was merely a matter of cataloguing of material phenomena, and that it represented a "new objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit). He also insisted that he was simply a "recorder" of said objects.

That might strike people as odd, in this age when pretentious "post-modernists" defile Christ in urine, or actually sell cans of their own excrement to the Museum of Modern Art for tens of thousands of dollars, when *anything* and *everything* qualifies to be deemed as art, without any formal -- or toilet -- training necessary. Yet, Renger-Patzsch disdained the moniker of "artist" that his enthusiasts tried to make stick to him. I wonder if he would still have that attitude with all the literal crap that poses as art today.

Renger-Patzsch's photographs weren't merely objective, they were pure idealism, for he always arranged or composed the subjects of his photographs to be seen in their best light. Whether it was simple pictures of common items, such as hand trowels, shoe trees or foliage, his photographs had a sensuous quality to them that makes the viewer want to reach into his photographs to touch them.

He had a gift for making the commonplace beautiful and for creating gorgeous landscapes out of factory works and basalt mines. His industrial prints are contemporaneous with any of Charles Scheeler's or Margaret Bourke-White's, but bear a much subtler imprint; There is a quiet quality to his prints, in which man is either alone and isolated or conspicuously absent (as with his photographs of houses outside of Essen and Dortmund), but the handiwork of man is ever-present.

His photographs are very strong, nonetheless, very masculine. He had a stylised eye that cut extraneous subject matter out of his images the way a butcher slices fat away from a side of bacon. Yet, the beautiful, transparent delicateness of his photographs of glass beakers from the Schott Glassworks in Jena speak with a gentle, feminine voice and his photographs of enamel bowls or a child's Pelikan paintbox have a Japanese feel to them, in their iconic and minimalistic compositions.

It is sad to say that even most American enthusiasts of fine-arts photography have never heard of Albert Renger-Patzsch. This volume, nonetheless, contains the best of his work and makes a strong argument for including him in the pantheon of the twentieth century's greatest photographers.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure , it's great ., March 10, 2000

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"taiwanphoto" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Albert Renger-Patzch: Photographer of Objectivity (Hardcover)

If you love Ansel , then you should love Albert too . though most of Ansel's photogarphs shows the beauty of nature ,Albert showed his sensity in humaneness and manmade stuffs .