586
Visite; Cabinet Cards; Fenton, Roger; Architecture;
Portraiture; Landscape; Industrial Photography
Further Reading
Exh. cat. “In unnachahmlicher Treue,” Cologne 1979.
Exh. cat. Alles Wahrheit! Alles Lüge! Photographie und Wirklich-
keit im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Sammlung Robert Lebeck, Co-
logne Dresden 1996.
Honnef, Klaus, Rolf Sachsse, Karin Thomas (ed.), German Pho-
tography 1870–1970, New Haven Cologne : Yale University
Press / DuMont 1997.
Stenger, Erich, Siegeszug der Photographie in Kultur, Wis-
senschaft, Technik, Bad Harzburg 1938 (2nd ed. Seebruck
1950).
von Dewitz, Bodo (ed.), Silber und Salz, Photographie in den
deutschsprachigen Ländern 1839–1869, Cologne Heidelberg
1989.
GERNSHEIM, ALISON (1911–1969) AND
HELMUT ERICH ROBERT (1913–1995)
Helmut Gernsheim was born in Munich, Germany, on
March 1, 1913, of mixed background, his mother com-
ing from Catholic stock and his father being a Protestant
convert with a long Jewish heritage in the Bavarian city
of Worms. His family was comfortably middle-class, his
father being a literary historian employed by the Munich
University Library, and growing up in the progressive
European city of Munich afforded the youth both an
excellent education and a strong cultural upbringing.
Fascinated by materiality he became an inveterate col-
lector of objects and upon graduation in 1933 resolved
to study art history like his eldest brother, Walter—fi rst
under the art historian, William Pinder, and then at the
Bavarian State School of Photography.
He graduated summa cum laude in 1937, worked
as a practical photographer for a year, and then fl ed
the rising tide of Nazism in Germany. He moved to
London in July of that year, fi rst working for Walter
who owned an art gallery there, and then establishing
himself as a commercial photographer. Nonetheless,
the critical and scholarly aspects of photography were
never far from his mind and—rejecting such schools as
pictorialism, photojournalism and experimental abstract
art—he became an early advocate for the principles of
the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch and his
Neue Sachlichkeit school of modern art, while actively
participating in the British photographic societies and
exhibitions of the era.
Alison Eames was born in London on February 10,
1911, receiving a middle class education at Brikbeck
College and a fi nishing school in Paris. Back in London
and while pursuing a clerical career, she married an ac-
countant, Blen Williams. The couple met Helmut at a
London nudist park in 1938 where all were members.
Within a year Alison separated from her husband and
began her relationship with Helmut. Like so many oth-
ers at the time, their lives were dramatically interrupted
by World War II.
Helmut was interned in Australia as a “friendly
enemy alien” in July of 1940 and, following a long
bureaucratic struggle, fi nally made it back to embattled
London in November of 1941. There he and Alison
were able to establish a home in 1942 after she won an
amicable divorce from her husband, maintaining a de
facto marriage until they could legally wed after the war.
While enduring the bombing of London, Alison pursued
her secretarial career and Helmut won a coveted position
with the Warburg Institute as the chief photographer for
the London area, documenting British buildings and
statuary for the National Buildings Record from 1942
to 1945. While engaged in making a permanent photo-
graphic record of the art and architecture endangered
by the war, Helmut also produced a major body of work
which sought to “instill life and action in the stone.”
He also became a published author in 1942 with his
New Photo Vision, a small but important critical treatise
which condemned the staid practices of pictorialism,
advocated the principles of modern European photog-
raphy, pointed out the vibrant historical roots of the
medium, and argued for the active role of the photog-
rapher in making the world see things anew. The book
would provide him with the initial fame and advocacy
he craved and marked his emergence as a dynamic and
critical voice for the new art.
At the end of 1944 the Gernsheims were visited in
London by Beaumont Newhall, the dean of American
photohistorians. They discovered a kindred spirit and
Newhall for his part encouraged them to begin col-
lecting historical British photography as the war was
winding down and a new era was beginning. The sug-
gestion ignited Helmut’s old collecting urges and on
January 6, 1945, he headed off into the antique shops
and fairs of London to begin building a collection. The
man and the timing proved to be more than correct and
Helmut quickly amassed some important and discrimi-
nating pieces of art and apparatus from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Supported by Alison’s
encouragement, scholarship and writing talents, they
began to build an important body of art and artifacts in
their London fl at.
In 1947 they elected to make the brave decision to
abandon their careers—his as a photographer and hers
as secretary to a Member of Parliament—and devote
themselves full-time to the building and marketing
of the already famous Gernsheim Collection and the
support activities of writing, editing, lecturing and the
creation of exhibitions. They would do so actively, care-
fully and passionately for a total of eighteen years, until- In the course of their efforts they discovered and
acquired whole bodies of art by such important fi gures