Further Reading
Doty, Robert.Photo-secession: Photography as a Fine Art.,
Rochester, New York: George Eastman House, 1960; as
Photo-Secession: Stieglitz and the Fine-Art Movement in
Photography. New York: Dover Publications, 1978.
Harker, Margaret.The Linked Ring, The Secession in Pho-
tography in Britain, 1892–1910. London: Heinemann,
1979.
The London Salon. http://www.londonsalon.org (accessed May
17, 2005).
Rosenblum, Naomi.A World History of Photography. New
York: Abbeville, 1984.
———.A History of Women Photographers., New York:
Abbeville Press, 1994.
Royal Photography Society. http://www.rps.org (accessed May
17, 2005).
Whelan, Richard.Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1995.HERBERT LIST
German
Herbert List figures as one of the most important
German avant-garde photographers of the 1930s
and 1940s. Although List was rightly named one
of the most important German photographers in
the post-war years, he was nearly forgotten in the
1960s and 1970s. One reason he was again recog-
nized in the 1970s was that his art recommended
itself to the concerns of the last years of the twen-
tieth century: formal innovation, the exploration of
the self, and he did not fit without contradiction
into eitherNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity) or
Surrealism—the trends dominating Germany dur-
ing his formative years.
Central to this new reception of List’s works
were his surrealistic sill lifes created in the 1930s.
Already at that time the critic Egon Vietta had
emphasized the metaphysical aspects of List’s
works and connected them to the works of Giorgio
de Chirico, Carlo Carra`s, and the painting of the
Pittura Metafisica. In the unique aura of his puz-
zling still lifes List positioned objects so that the
light endowed them with surreal qualities and
metaphysical elements. List himself speaks of a
‘‘mysterious marriage’’ that the objects celebrate
with one another, and that he intended ‘‘to reveal
the magical substance within them.’’
Andre ́ Breton and the Paris Surrealists influ-
enced List’s early works. List seized on such artistic
techniques as double exposure, and he combined
objects in a way that recalled the works of poet
Comte de Lautreamont. In these works, List does
not combine objects that are essentially foreign to
each other; he tears objects from a shared context
and then they establish a wonderful correspon-
dence with each other. Borrowing from Surrealism,
List developed his own formal language using ele-
ments of neo-classicism that dominated advertising
art and fashion in the 1920s.
List’s works from the 1930s show the influence
of themes from Greek antiquity. Two themes that
move through his entire oeuvre are images of
Greece and photographs of young men. List’s
interest in Greece was nurtured by a humanist
education as well as the high esteem Greeks placed
on the love of boys; this was the image of ancient
Greece promoted by the poet Stefan Georg that
Friedrich Gundolf then conveyed to List, whom
he met during List’s short stay as a student at the
University of Heidelberg.
In 1937, List embarked on a trip to Greece that
lasted a number of months. There he photo-
graphed temples and sculptures of classical Greece
as well as the landscape, architecture, and resi-
dents of the islands. He composed these photo-
graphs so the ruins of antique temples would have
a monumental appearance.
His photographs also included everyday objects,
such as clothing mannequins he photographed
along the streets of Athens, fishing nets, and
beach-front bars. He staged these in photographs
that can only be described as magic realism. The
works were exhibited in the Galerie du Chasseur
d’images in Paris and were the first to earn List
recognition. He then published photographs in
Harper’s Bazaar, Verve,Photographie, andLife.
The publication of the book Licht u ̈ber HellasLINKED RING