HEINZ HAJEK-HALKE
German
Best known for his production and promotion of
abstractLichtgrafik(light graphics), German pho-
tographer Heinz Hajek-Halke experimented with
nearly every photographic style and technique devel-
oped in the twentieth century. Well regarded by his
fellow practitioners, he remained a somewhat more
obscure figure to the general public until the 1990s,
when a renewed historical interest in the arts, poli-
tics, and culture of Germany’s Weimar republic
sparked a resurgent interest in his career. Though
he enjoyed early success with his experimental mon-
tage, reportage, advertising, industrial, and botani-
cal photographs, Hajek-Halke’s major contribution
to modern photography remains his development of
a unique abstract pictorial idiom in the form of
camera-less photographs produced after the Second
World War.
Hajek-Halke aligned himself with experimental
photographers like La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray,
and Herbert Bayer and was perhaps this group’s most
tireless promoter of the camera’s unique aesthetic
possibilities. He eschewed the straight or ‘‘objective’’
style of photography practiced by German contem-
poraries like August Sander and the Group f/64
school in the United States, in favor of highly me-
diated montages and abstract imagery produced via
creative darkroom experimentation. More than a
mere practitioner of this experimental style, Hajek-
Halke was an equally passionate photographic edu-
cator whose popular booksExperimentelle Fotografie
(1955) andLichtgrafik(1964) had an international
influence in part due to text translations into three
languages. Rather than conceal his innovative techni-
ques, Hajek-Halke deliberately revealed his working
methods in detailed captions noting his exacting
darkroom procedures. For example, the caption for
the photographTanaquilin his 1955 book reads:
Exposure mounting.—3 negatives: 1) picture of clouds,
2) agaric (top view), 3) picture of nude, glass negative,
was sooted on the back and cleaned with dry brush only
insofar as was needed, for the desired pictorial effect.—2
exposures, the enlarger being set differently for each.
(Hajek-Halke,Experimentelle Fotografie1955, un-
paginated)Among Hajek-Halke’s most important works were
his experimental ‘‘light graphic’’ images made with-
out a camera. More than mere photograms, these
images evolved from the photographer’s combina-
tion of various chemical and mechanical techniques.
Hajek-Halke regularly combined non-traditional
materials such as wire, glass, dirt, varnish, and fish
bones with darkroom procedures like solarization,
double exposure, montage, and even the occasional
smoking or burning of a negative. Many of the resul-
tant images, likeFriedhof der Fische, of 1939, retain
recognizable forms while an equal number are more
fully abstract. In the former, one recognizes the influ-
ence of Bauhaus photographer Walter Peterhans’s
evocative subject matter and the abstract forms of
Moholy-Nagy’s photograms. In the latter, the weight
of the medium’s inherent objectivity strains against
the subjectivity of the unidentifiable forms to create
images that are at once assertive and immediate yet
suspended in a kind of dreamy, timeless alchemy.
Born in Berlin in 1898, Hajek-Halke spent the
majority of his childhood in Argentina before
returning to Germany in 1910 at age 12. Although
his father—an academic painter and caricaturist—
discouraged him from pursuing a career in the visual
arts, in 1915 Hajek-Halke enrolled as a painting
student at Berlin’s Ko ̈niglichen Kunstschule. His
initial career as a film poster designer was inter-
rupted by his active service in the First World
War. At the war’s end, the young photographer
resumed his studies at the Berlin Museum of Arts
and Crafts under the Czech Vienna Secessionist gra-
phic artist Emil Orlik before traveling to Hamburg
where he produced publicity photos for a chemical-
pharmaceutical firm. Hajek-Halke returned to Ber-
lin in 1923 to work as a picture editor, printer, and
draftsman at the Dammert publishing house, but it
was not until his 1924 apprenticeship in the studio of
famous Berlin photographer, Yva, that he began to
seriously explore the expressive potential of the
photographic medium through collage and mon-
tage. From the mid-1920s through the early 1930s,
Hajek-Halke worked as a freelance photojournalist
for Berlin’s Presse-Photo agency while pursuing his
own experimental fine art photography. During this
time, he also collaborated with photojournalist Willi
Ruge and Bruno Schulz, editor of the journalHAJEK-HALKE, HEINZ