ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCH
German
Albert Renger-Patzsch is one of the most important
promoters of modern photography in Germany, and
his famous bookDie Welt ist scho ̈n(The World is
Beautiful; 1928) is considered a bible of the German
modernist movements calledNeue Sachlichkeit(New
Objectivity) andNeue Sehen(New Vision). With this
publication, Renger-Patzsch became famous over-
night, seemingly almost against his will, considering
his reluctance to collect his own writings on avant-
garde photography.Die Welt ist scho ̈nis without a
doubt one of the most important books on twenti-
eth-century photography and was received with
almost rapturous praise, though the author was
angry that the book was understood philosophically
and instead held it up as his declared belief
in optimism (in a letter to Franz Roh from 1930,
see Albert Renger-Patzsch,Ruhrgebiet Landschaften
[Ruhr Area Landscapes],1927–1935, edited by Ann
Wilde and Ju ̈rgen Wilde, Cologne: Du Mont, 1982,
p. 73). He had little interest in media and questions
of art history and paid no attention to the later styles
of photography. In the next decades, he did nothing
to follow on the surprise success of his famous book.
He preferred publishing his works himself, and he
was faithful to the stylistic principles he defined for
each book.
As a schoolboy, Renger-Patzsch began learning
photography under the tutelage of his father. After
ending his chemistry studies in Dresden, he began
working in 1921 at the Folkwang publishers in
Hagen, where he was director of their photography
archive. Together with the photographers Fred
Koch, Lotte Jacobi, and others, he built up a photo-
graphy collection. To serve his abiding interest in
the sciences, he also took photographs of plants and
flowers, and in texts he wrote at the time, he empha-
sized the ‘‘new perspective’’ that was created by
viewing the world ‘‘with the eye of an insect.’’ His
own photographs, which were appearing anon-
ymously in botany books published by Folkwang,
demonstrated the strong forms and interest in unu-
sually structured images that would mark his later
works. These early images also explored the aes-
thetic potential of close-ups and enlarging details.
The scientific uses for precise photographic docu-
mentation and for recording the characteristic qua-
lities of objects greatly impressed Renger-Patzsch.
To the end of his life, he claimed that photography
was not an art but a means of documenting, and
that it should not compete with the extreme effects
produced by graphic arts because this would cause
photography to lose it own treasure of nuance and
detail. He rejected any attempts to push photogra-
phy toward total abstraction.
In his earliest works, Renger-Patzsch was already
leading the retreat from Pictorialism or so-called art
photography. He was one of the first in Germany to
reject technical or manual manipulations to im-
prove the image, and he sought an unadulterated
objective quality of photography. In this way, his
works are comparable to those of Paul Strand in the
United States; he was also called ‘‘the German
Edward Weston’’ for the same reason. By the mid-
1920s, Renger-Patzsch was publishing photography
collections in rapid succession. His preferred sub-
jects were architectural and landscape photo-
graphy, and he often placed them in powerful
sequences to create city portraits. In addition, he
made impressive photographs of heavy industry. As
one of the first photographers with great ambitions,
he recorded the detailed construction of machines.
Already in his early works one can see how the
experience of the modern world influenced his art.
Renger-Patzsch saw that the possibility of record-
ing ‘‘the rigid linear structures of modern technol-
ogy, the airy gridwork of cranes and bridges, the
dynamic of 1,000 horse-powered machines’’ was
better in photography than in any other medium.
His credo demanded that he stand in service of the
object and present the material objectively—a rigid
will to form is noticeable in both his early and later
publications. His photographs demonstrate an
almost classical severity in the tension created by
formal details on the image surface. Rows of metal
scaffolding thicken into constructed rhythms;
seams along the shore banks divide the image into
shifting planes; stacks of identical products create
detailed serial patterns—with these effects, he
attempts to liberate spatial detail from all contin-
gent elements and produce a new surface organism.
In this way, Renger-Patzsch takes his photographs
to the border of abstraction even as he alwaysRENGER-PATZSCH, ALBERT