Further Reading
Cheim, John, ed.Bruce Weber. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.,
1989.
Weber Bruce.Bruce Weber: Roadside America. New York:
te Neues Publishing Company, 2001.
Weber, Bruce.Gentle Giants. Boston, MA: Little, Brown &
Co., 1992.
Weber, Bruce.O Rio de Janeiro.New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1986.
Weber, Bruce.The Andy Book.Tokyo: Doeisha Co., Ltd. &
C.W.J. Co., Ltd., 1984.
Weiermair, Peter.Portrait the Portraits in Contemporary
Photography. Edition Stemmle, 1994.WOLFGANG WEBER
German
Wolfgang Weber is one of the pioneers of the so
called modern photojournalism, established in Ger-
many from the late 1920s. He was not just a photo-
grapher for magazines, but also the author of the
texts and captions published with the pictures. He
had influenced the selection of the pictures and the
design of the pages, too. Most of his reportages were
about Germany and foreign countries and their
social, political, or economical situations and condi-
tions, subjects on which he was conversant given his
education as ethnologist.
He was born in 1902 to a wealthy family in Leipzig.
With his father, an industrialist and ethnologist, and
his mother, a painter, he moved to Munich around
- There he finished school and started to study
ethnology, philosophy, and music in 1920. He was
very interested in music and decided to be trained as a
conductor as well. Because of his academic training
he got the opportunity to do research for the Pho-
netic Institute of the University of Berlin. In 1925, he
traveled to East Africa and recorded the songs of the
Vadjaggas tribe living near Mt. Kilimanjaro. Besides
the equipment for sound recording, he brought a
camera for stereo-pictures. After his return, a few
pictures accompanied by Weber’s short texts were
published in German magazines. This was his first
appearance as a photo reporter, although he was not
a trained photographer. Like many other photo-
journalists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was
a non-professional, educated more in intellectual,
then photo-technical terms. Weber as an ethnologist
had a strong background for his reports dealing with
situations, conditions, or changes in foreign regions
like Africa, South America, or Asia.
As a photographer as well as an author, Weber
also did illustrated books always related to his
travels. In 1927, he was commissioned to create a
photo-portrait of Barcelona, Spain. The Albertus-
Verlag, Berlin published it in 1928 with 224 photo-
graphs, each on a single page. This book belonged
to a series calledDas Gesicht der Sta ̈dte(Face of the
Cities), in which, for example, Germaine Krull, one
of the most important female avant-garde photo-
graphers of the 1920s and 1930s did the portrait
about Paris. As a whole, these pictures are special
within Weber’s work. They are quiet and peaceful,
often without people, like the pictures of Paris by
the French photographer Euge`ne Atget.
In 1929, he made his first trip to the United States.
Different articles were published inMu ̈nchner Illu-
strierte Presse(MIP) with over 70 pictures. Besides
his traveling, he also took assignments for other
subjects. Some of his great reportages of the early
years areDorf ohne Arbeit(1931), showing the situa-
tion of unemployed people in the German country-
side,Der Prozeß, dem die Welt zuho ̈rt(1933) about
the trial against the Dutch van der Lubbe, who was
accused of burning the Reichstag andDas Olympia-
Stadion fu ̈llt sich(1936), an impressive example for a
photo sequence in magazines and how pictures could
produce a content of meaning without many words.
They all were published inBerliner Illustrirte Zeitung
(BIZ).
After seven years as a freelancer, Weber became a
staff member of the Ullstein Verlag, Berlin in 1932
and mainly worked for theBIZ, one of several
newspapers, likeDie DameorVossische Zeitung,
published by Ullstein. When many of the photo-
journalists left Germany at the beginning of the
1930s and the founder of Ullstein Verlag was ex-WEBER, WOLFGANG