47
work, signifi cantly a practical focal-plane shutter that
was in production for over 35 years in the cameras of
C. P. Goerz in Berlin, and developed a moving picture
viewer for his series chronophotographs that preceeded
the Edison Kinetoscope, the rise of modernist aesthetics
early in the 20th century and the unusual technology of
his moving picture system combined wholly to eclipse
his work. Until the 1990s there was neither any substan-
tive research into his career nor any exhibitions devoted
to it. One part of the problem in dealing with Anschütz
is his own habit of secrecy regarding his work: he made
an inviolable distinction between photographs that he
considered artistic, and worthy of public exhibition, and
those he considered commercial and therefore of little
interest. As a result, he exhibited and also published his
ground-breaking “instantaneous” pictures taken in 1883-
1887 that captured the movements of animals, troops on
manoeuvre, and, strikingly, storks in and around their
nests, for almost 20 years until they became over-famil-
iar and helped characterise his career as old-fashioned
and passé. Another problem is found in Anschütz’s
extraordinary moving picture work, which absorbed
him almost completely between 1886 and 1894: despite
its success with audiences and its remarkable achieve-
ments in reproducing natural movement, his failings
as a businessman led him to assemble huge debts by
late 1892. This debt seriously threatened the social and
economic standing of this provincial photographer who
had risen to become the photographic instructor to the
Kaiser’s wife and family, and who circulated amongst
the elite social and business personalities of Berlin.
With imminent collapse facing both his reputation and
his energetically led photographic business, Anschütz
abandoned his pioneering moving picture experiments,
even repressing its artifacts and pictures, so that this
important part of his work also disappeared, leaving
him at the end of his career between 1894 and 1907 in
the superfi cial public record as a champion of amateur
photography and defender of conservative genre pho-
tography. Obituaries noted the passing of one of the “old
guard” of photography.
In the 1870s and 1880s, instantaneous photography,
or exposures fast enough to capture quickly moving
subjects in natural settings were the cutting edge of
photographic technology. Photographers like the Graf
von Esterhazy, Alfred Lugardon, and others took many
prizes at international exhibitions for their often sur-
prising mages of leaping dogs and jumping men, but it
was Ottomar Anschütz who consistently led the fi eld,
principally by using a focal-plane shutter which he
developed into a practical design in 1882, fi rst used to
take naturalistic photographs of troops during their fi eld
exercises. To aid his ability to work quickly, he etched
a focussing scale on the outside of his lens tube, so he
could change plates and make an accurate exposure
very rapidly. His special camera, which Anschütz kept
secret for seven years, also allowed him to develop a
photographic method far in advance of its time: in an
era when any photographic subject was universally
subservient to the assumed demands of the medium,
or to the imposed demands of the photographer’s style,
Anschütz gave his subjects complete freedom, his cam-
era allowing him to simply follow their actions, whether
farmers and workingmen around Lissa, which produced
sequences of complete movements and activities, or
animals from the Breslau Zoo photographed from a
specially constructed blind, which produced informal
images of foxes, leopards, monkeys and other animals.
In this work, as the large collection of surviving prints
with consecutive negative numbers at the Hochschule
der Künste in Berlin illustrates, Anschütz with his plate
camera anticipated the much later photographic practise
of the leading photojournalists of the 1930s and 1940s
with their fast-acting 35mm apparatus.
Anschütz turned to series chronophotography in 1886
with an impressive set of pictures of horses and riders
taken at the Royal riding academy in Hanover. At fi rst
using a set of 12 cameras equipped with his focal plane
shutter, the next year he developed a unique apparatus
using 24 lenses and shutters but incorporating sophisti-
cated adjustments so that complete, “closed” movements
—where the fi rst and last images would match when
reproduced in a circular viewer like the zoetrope or
phenakistiscope—could be recorded. Building his own
electrically-based viewer called the Schnellseher, which
used the intermittent fl ash of light from a Geissler tube to
illuminate series photographs fi xed to the rim of a rotat-
ing disk, Anschütz then began to exhibit photographic
moving pictures in public, fi rst at the Ausstellungspark
in Berlin in 1887. Over the next fi ve years some eight
different models of this viewer were widely exhibited
across Europe and America, often in “Schnellseher
parlours” of a dozen or more machines such as those in
New York City, Berlin, Hamburg, and London. For the
commercial deployment of his Schnellseher, Anschütz
made special entertainment chronophotographs, none
of which survive, including subjects like Skatspieler
(Card Players), Mimenspiel (Man with Changing
Expressions), Lustige Fahrt (Funny Journey) and Bar-
bierstube (Barber Shop Scene), several of which were
precisely echoed in the earliest fi lms of Thomas Edison,
the Lumère brothers, and Georges Méliès. Because of
an odd business agreement with the leading electrical
fi rm of Siemens & Halske, which manufactured some
137 automat Schnellsehers for him, the fi nancial col-
lapse of the Electrical Wonder Company in London left
Anschütz with a personal debt of over 47,000 Marks to
the Berlin fi rm, and after the EWC’s failure he repressed
most of his chronophotographic work, including over
100 series of dancers intended for teaching and an