claims that his works bring out the essence of the
objects photographed.
This ambivalence is typical of the artistic view-
point during the Weimar Republic. As soon as
Renger-Patzsch publishedDie Welt ist scho ̈n in
1922 with photographs from the period (he wanted
to call the book simply ‘‘The Things’’), he became
known as the main representative of the Neue
Sachlichkeit movement in photography. But he
had already had enthusiastic reviews by some pro-
minent authors. Contributing to his rise in fame
was the foreword to his book, written by the art
historian Carl Georg Heise, which situated the
photographs in the ontological discourse of con-
temporary theories of art, with their tendency to
describe the symbolic quality and expressive es-
sence of objects. The novelist Thomas Mann
praised the images for this tendency, as did the
writer Kurt Tucholsky. Walter Benjamin later cri-
ticized them for aesthetically stylizing the world
into pure surfaces, an apparent overvaluation of
the book’s title. In reality, Renger-Patzsch’s aes-
thetic sprang more from an interest, driven by
science, in the composition of the visual structures
of the outside world than from a desire for harmo-
nic design. He sought to discover ordering princi-
ples that would show the relationship between art
and nature, and technology and nature. Thus, basic
tectonic patterns dominate the various objects in
his work, and there are correspondingly few por-
trait photographs, prominently among which are
those of workers at the Gru ̈nthal coppersmith.
Where he does make occasional portraits, they are
more conventional than his work with objects, and
they often have traces of tastes from the turn of the
century, especially the influence of Hugo Erfurth.
In all of his other works, he executes his intentions
without compromise in a style uncoupled from the
painterly tradition, and he does this even in the
many commissioned works for industry, which
embraced the new language of objective still-life
photography. The still life he created in 1925 for
Kaffee Hag would become famous. Many progres-
sive architects ordered series of photographs of
their new buildings from him.
In photographic work not directly commis-
sioned, Renger-Patzsch restricts his subjects to the
inanimate world. People rarely appear in his photo-
graphs. He makes industrialization’s influence on
the landscape his main focus. The juxtaposition of
modern technology and nature gives his photo-
graphs of the Ruhr area in western Germany,
which was rarely ever photographed, a special
appeal. He often represents a city’s outer limits,
where streets and fallow land intersect. These still-
life photographs of such scenes are comparable to
the paintings of his contemporary Franz Radziwill.
It made no difference in his work whether his sub-
jects were things from the natural world or archi-
tecture, industrial products, or machines. His eye
would monumentalize all objects, even the smal-
lest. The division of his photographs into planes,
lines, and zones of light and shadow remained
especially constant, independent of the object pho-
tographed. To subordinate them to a leveling per-
spective, he forced his cool stylistic intention and
principles of representation onto all subjects, de
facto founding a popular style or school of photo-
graphy. Photographers of the 1930s and 1940s,
such as Hugo Schmo ̈lz, Adolf Lazi, Walter Peter-
hans, Wilhelm Castelli, Werner Mannsfeldt, the
young Andreas Feininger, Arvid Gutschow, and
Alfred Ehrhardt, followed his lead; later, in the
1960s Bernd and Hilla Becher promulgated a simi-
lar style to their students, including Thomas Struth,
in the 1980s.
After he gave up the position Max Buchartz had
secured for him in 1934 as an instructor of photo-
graphy at the Folkwangschule in Essen, Renger-
Patzsch worked without permanent employment
until his death. In his later works, he avoided even
more than before all dramatic intensification of
effects, eliminating the confusing lines that still char-
acterize ‘‘Fabrikschornstein’’ from 1925 and the fa-
mous photograph ‘‘Herrenwyk Blast Furnac’’ from- The choice of themes became more restricted,
the subjects more idyllic, apparently unrelated to the
less restrictive atmosphere of post-World War II
Germany. Renger-Patzsch retreated into himself
more and more. He produced privately published,
expensive collections of uncompromising artistry
after repeated demands by Ernst Boehringer. Al-
though his style remained faithful to his prewar
works, especially in his reduction of visual intensity,
his subjects were less monumental; the graphic qua-
lities of fine linear forms and gradations of gray
became more dominant, and in general there is a
decrease in the mischievousness with which he
chose detail and perspective.
At the end of his life, Renger-Patzsch made it
known that photography no longer actually inter-
ested him, ‘‘but the object all the more.’’ His books
on trees and rocks, in which photographs are
paired with accompanying scientific texts that give
precise information about the characteristics of the
represented objects, suggest the same systematic
intentions as his early work. He thus reinforced
the delicate interrelationship between the particular
and the general that he has sought in his strictly
photographic works. Later, he would emphasize
RENGER-PATZCH, ALBERT