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Choi Injin, Park Juseok, and Lee Kyungmin, History of Korean
Photography, Seoul: The Research Institute The History of
Photography, 1998. Exhibition Catalogue. Korean text.
Cho P’ang-Haeng, Yi-Dynasty through Pictures, Volumes 1 and
2, Seoul: Somuntang, 1994. Korean text.
Chung Sung-Kil, Korea One Hundred Years Ago: Photographs
(1871–1910), Seoul: Korea Information Cultural Center,
Seoul, 1989. Korean text.
Kwon Jong-Wook, A Study on the activity of Japanese photogra-
phers in the early history of Korean photography, in Bulletin
of The Japan Society for Arts and History of Photography,
vol. 14, no. 1, 2005 (text in Japanese).
Oh Ki-Kwon (ed.), 100 Years of Korean History in photographs
1876 – 1976, Seoul: Dong-A Ilbo, 1978. Korean text.
Underwood, Peter A., Moffett, Samuel H., and Sibley, Norman
R., First Encounters: Korea 1880–1910, Seoul: Dragon’s Eye
Graphics, 1982.
Yi Hon, Independence Movement through Pictures, Volume 1,
Seoul: Somuntang, 1987. Korean Text.
KOTZSCH, CARL FRIEDRICH AUGUST
(1836–1910)
German photographer
Carl Friedrich August Kotzsch was born Sept. 20, 1836,
in Loschwitz near Dresden. Working in his father’s
vineyard he received only a basic formal education.
From 1853, the Kotzsch house was host to a colony of
artists, mostly students of the well-known graphic artist
Ludwig Richter. Around 1860 August Kotzsch began to
draw and take photographs. From 1861, August Kotzsch
was known as professional photographer in Loschwitz.
Around 1870 he began with the production of still life
photographs of common fruits like apples, grapes, and
quinces, which were placed on simple plates and shelves.
Nothing is known about the reasons why he took up
these forms of photography hitherto completely alien to
the medium except for industrial products. Roughly fi fty
of these still lifes were produced within a comparatively
short time, always using a shadowy daylight—exactly
the way Karl Blossfeldt did with his widely acclaimed
plant images forty years later. The stunning quality of
these still lifes exceed his good quality as a travel and
landscape photographer. Curiously enough, these im-
ages were recovered from obscurity in the 1980s. After
1895, there is no photograph known from his studio. On
October 23, 1910, August Kotzsch died in Loschwitz
which he never left farther than walking distance.
Rolf Sachsse
KRASZNA-KRAUSZ, ANDOR
(1904–1989)
The twentieth century career of the photographic pub-
lisher Andor Kraszna-Krausz had a decisive impact on
the revival of interest in nineteenth century photography,
but just how his own interest in the medium came about
remains obscure. When setting out in Great Britain in
the late 1930s to establish the Focal Press, the imprint
that by the 1960s would become the world’s largest and
most esteemed publishing house for books about pho-
tography, fi lm and television, he often reminded people
that he had had a long career in Germany working for
the Continent’s largest specialist photography publisher,
Wilhelm Knapp in Leipzig. And this was perfectly true,
as far as it went. What remained unsaid was that his
experience with Knapp was almost exclusively in Berlin
as the fi lm critic and then editor of the leading moving
picture trade paper Die Filmtechnik from 1925 to 1936.
With strong domestic fi lm production dominated by the
Universum Film, A. G. (UFA) studios and signifi cant
interchange with American producers in Hollywood,
Weimar Berlin was, arguably, at the time the leading
centre for fi lm criticism and fi lm theory, where Kraszna-
Krausz published in parallel with writers like Herbert
Ihering, Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim. His
lengthy, detailed analyses of fi lms by F. W. Murnau,
Fritz Lang, E. A. Dupont, Viktor Sjöström, G. W. Pabst,
Charles Chaplin, John Ford, Vslevod Pudovkin, Fred
Niblo and others were mixed on Kraszna-Krausz’s rich
palette with equally incisive notices of documentaries,
experimental productions, and animated fi lms. He regu-
larly supplemented his reviews and interviews for Die
Filmtechnik with intense editorials decrying impersonal
commercial productions, the dominance of the star sys-
tem, and the exorbitant production costs of fi lms, while
arguing in other essays on behalf of socially relevant,
culturally signifi cant fi lmmaking and examining the
contributions of technicians to the art of fi lmmaking.
But apart from reviews of a few books which included
photography, such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Malerei,
Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film) of
1926, there is little evidence in these years of the passion
for photography with which Kraszna-Krausz launched
his second career in Britain.
Established in 1938, Kraszna-Krausz’s Focal Press at
fi rst relied heavily on his former contacts in Germany.
Two of Focal’s fi rst titles, Snaps of Children and How
to Take Them along with A Good Picture Every Time,
both by Alex Strasser, were translations of works pub-
lished earlier by Knapp in Germany, who also printed
the books for the new British publisher. The 1939 title
Phototips on Children: The Psychology, the Technique
and the Art of Child Photography was written by Krasz-
na-Krausz’s longstanding colleague in fi lm criticism,
Rudolf Arnheim, together with his wife Mary Arnheim,
undoubtedly as they passed through Britain on their way
to distinguished new careers in America. One of the
earliest books from the press, The All-in-One Camera
Book by E. Emanuel and F. L. Dash, was a solid success,
ultimately running to some 81 editions and remaining in
print until the early 1990s. Perhaps encouraged by the