der was forced to experience how photography was
used as a means of propaganda in Nazi Germany—
and compelled to deliver acceptable images. At the
end of the war, Schneider was fortunate to be able
to hold onto his Luftwaffe-issue Leica and other
equipment, which facilitated his career as a profes-
sional photographer. After a brief period of captiv-
ity as prisoner of war, he worked as a freelance
photographer, first in Koblenz and then in Meers-
burg on Lake Constance beginning in 1947, where
he maintained close contact with his colleagues
Heinz Hajek-Halke and Peter Keetman.
Today it is difficult to comprehend the contem-
porary excitement about the apparently radical
visual language of the young German photographers
around 1950. An anonymous newspaper cartoon
from the period shows people twisting and turning
their bodies in strange contortions in front of the
pictures in a photo exhibition in order to understand
the unusual content of the images. Some exhibition
visitors are overtaken by laughter; others require
medical attention. This humorous critique referred
to exhibitions that included Schneiders’s photo-
graphs of surface structures or light reflections, as
inSpiegelnden Scheiben(Reflecting Glass Panes) of
- In the early 1950s, there was an obvious lack
of acceptance for artistic works that did not corre-
spond to traditional concepts of representation, both
in the socialist realism of Hitler’s propaganda and
the earlier conventions typical of Pictorialism with
its emphasis on flattering portraits and sentimental
genre scenes.
Comparing Schneiders’s photographs from the
late 1940s and those of other fotoform members
with other post-war photographers in terms of their
motifs, a radical renunciation of the images of de-
struction is apparent. This motif had been so wide-
spread up to that point that an embrace of abstracted
nature and light studies seemed inappropriate given
the very real circumstances in Germany and Europe
in general. Subjective photography and fotoform
were quickly criticized for their pure formalism and
aestheticism, which was in such sharp contrast to the
socially engaged photography typical of the era. Yet
Schneiders and his fotoform colleagues had not
turned a blind eye to the social realities. According
to the art historian and contemporary, J.A. Schmoll
Eisenwerth, the works reflected ‘‘a broader outlook,
in that the scenes had a particularly lonely atmo-
sphere, which conveyed a sense of coldness and loss.’’
The photographs of the fotoform group have their
origins in the photographic experiments of theNeues
Sehen(New Vision) movement of the 1920s, both in
terms of style and content, and they bear similarity to
some of the painting of the 1950s, in particular to
American Abstract Expressionism and its French
counterpart,Informel. Significant similarities between
the content of abstract painting and photography are
less common in this period than often assumed, if one
can even compare the two media at all. Schneiders
demonstrated a persistent interest in the fundamental
forms of nature that are shaped by chance, such as air
bubbles beneath the icy surface of a lake (‘‘Luftblasen
in spiegel eis,’’ 1953) or delicate branches of snow-
covered trees. Nature was a constant source of
inspiration. With an attentive and curious eye, he
discovered his symbolically laden subject matter on
his long walks in the fall and winter, usually in the
area near Lake Constance. The photographs were
taken after a period of close observation, which
often included waiting outside for hours.
Detailed views of natural structures, reflections,
and shadows are characteristic of his pictorial lan-
guage. In his images, Schneiders emphasizes the
cropped view of what is actually seen; linear patterns
extend beyond the edge of the photograph—and
bear similarity to the all-over approach of Abstract
Expressionism. Schneiders uses related composi-
tional techniques in his images with a technical or
cultural subject matter—for example, the railroad
tracks in front of the engine hall from the year
1950 (‘‘Bahnhof fru ̈h morgens’’) or a Doric legal
inscription carved on a stone block on Crete from- The pattern-like quality of the depiction makes
the photographs seem to typify what they represent.
In addition to textures and objects that fill the
image, Schneiders’s work is also distinguished by a
small recognizable object—perhaps a white boot on
a dark lake or a lonely figure out for a walk on the
bright pavement. Images convey a solitary existence,
melancholy, and isolation. In some of his images, he
sensitively dramatizes the trauma of the war and
post-war period. This is particularly apparent in
the photograph of a woman sitting in a train com-
partment sunk deep in thought—a photograph
taken unobserved from a railroad platform some-
where in Germany in 1951. Her empty expression
behind the glass symbolizes the suffering, dashed
hopes, and melancholy of the postwar era. At the
same time, the shift from abstract photographic
studies to intense genre scenes in Schneiders’s work
represents the ‘‘human interest’’ zeitgeist in the
international photography of the 1950s and 1960s.
Schneiders’s interest in ordinary scenes, immediate
human encounters, and their photographic image
was heightened by his photojournalistic work outside
of Germany starting in the mid-1950s. In his travel
photography from the 1950s and 1960s in Europe,
Africa, and Asia, he generally avoided stylization,
the close-ups of nature, or light studies, which char-
SCHNEIDERS, TONI