ander Mitscherlich, Carl Orff, Botho Strauß, Mar-
tin Walser and Peter Zadek—major figures of
twentieth-century Germany.
The contemporary events he documented and the
German cultural personalities he photographed are
of unparalleled breadth. His colleagues at the maga-
zineStern, for example, Robert Lebeck, Thomas
Ho ̈pker, and Max Scheler, primarily worked in for-
eign photographic journalism—particularly in the
1960s. In contrast, Moses preferred to travel in Ger-
many, which he describes as ‘‘the most interesting
country in the world’’.
Following in the footsteps of his father, a passionate
hobby photographer who died at a young age, Moses
took his first photographs in 1936 with a large-format
Steinheil camera that had belonged to his father. From
then on, photography ‘‘had taken hold of him.’’ At 15,
while forced to work for a Breslau photo company, he
began his professional training with Grete Bodle ́e, a
photographer of children. Stefan Moses learned how
to use the small-format Leica and how to compose a
photographic portrait. Due to his Jewish ancestry, he
was sent to the Ostlinde work camp, from which he
managed to escape in 1945. Late that same year,
he continued his training in Erfurt. After completing
his apprenticeship, he was engaged as a theater
photographer for the Weimar Nationaltheater in
- This was the initial source of his great enthu-
siasm for the theater, which remains with him today.
In 1950, shortly after the founding of the GDR,
he moved to the Schwabing section of Munich—
renowned as a bohemian neighborhood since the
turn of the century. His colleagues and friends, Jo
von Kalckreuth and Herbert List, lived next door.
Moses worked as a photojournalist for newspapers
and magazines. Today, he still sees no difference
between journalistic and artistic photography.
A few of his series are particularly outstanding.
Manuel, the first publication as photo series in post-
war Germany, soon became a cult book of the 1960s
generation of parents. Here, Moses depicts his son
Manuel’s first year of childhood as a poetic story told
in images. For his seriesDie großen Alten(The Great
Elders), Stefan Moses chose the German forest as his
backdrop. Since the 1960s, he has created his unmis-
takable portraits of German politicians, authors, and
artists in this mythical and magical setting.
For over four decades, the photographer has
asked painters, sculptors, and even some colleagues
to create a mask out of materials from their immedi-
ate surroundings. This series,Ku ̈nstler machen Mas-
ken (Artists Make Masks), which is still being
continued today, was initiated in 1964 with por-
traits of the sculptor Gerhard Marck and the pain-
ter Ernst Wilhelm Nay.
Moses has German philosophers and thinkers
photograph themselves in a standing mirror that
he provides, so that the photographer appears in
the background of this conceptual series, called
Spiegelbilder(Mirror Images), as the inspirational
director of the scene.
Since the 1970s, Moses has consistently compiled
and published photo essays. In 1979, this approach
took the form of the trend-setting publication,
Transsibirische Eisenbahn(Trans Siberian Railroad),
with 26 photo narratives, evocative and metaphoric
images of human encounters.
Since 1953, he has been hot on the heels of
photographic subjects from throughout the world
and has researched his reports through different
trips to regions of North and South America and
Asia, but largely in numerous European countries,
Israel, Italy, Austria and also Hungary, where he
documented the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
With its numerous awards, exhibitions, and pub-
lications, this consistent and continuously expand-
ing body of work has also been internationally
recognized as one of the most outstanding German
contributions to photography in the second half of
the twentieth century. In 1990, Moses was awarded
the David-Octavius-Hill Medal of the Gesellschaft
Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL), and the following
year he received the ‘‘Honors Award of the City of
Munich,’’ awarded to a photographer for the first
time. In 1994, Moses was the first photographer to
be named a proper member of the Academy of the
Fine Arts in Munich. The photographer’s archive
(negatives, slides, original prints, records) is in the
collection of the Photography Museum within the
Munich City Museum, which featured the first
international retrospective of his work in 2002.
An accompanying monograph has been published
in order to do justice to the exhaustive scope of this
photographer’s work.
MatthiasHarderBiography
Born in 1928 in Liegnitz in Lower Silesia. 1936, first photo-
graphs with his father’s large-format Steinheil camera.
1943, beginning of his professional training as an assistant
to the children’s photographer, Grete Bodle ́e. Training
continued after the end of the war as an apprentice in
Erfurt. 1944–1945, interned in the Ostlinde labor camp
1947–1950, first employment as a theater photographer in
the Nationaltheater in Weimar. 1950, moved to Munich,
where he worked as a photojournalist for magazines, such
as theNeue Zeitung, Revue, Das Scho ̈nste, and magnum.
Traveled to New York, South America, Israel, and Asia in
the 1950s and 1960s. 1960–1968, features for the magazine
Stern; began his long-term photographic projects aboutMOSES, STEFAN