HUGO ERFURTH
German
Hugo Erfurth was the most influential German por-
trait photographer of the first half of the twentieth
century. Based in Dresden, then Cologne, Erfurth
specialized in portraits of leading artists, writers, and
dancers. By the 1920s, the photographer, then mid-
dle-aged, became closely associated with many of the
leading figures of German avant-garde painting. His
ability to capture their personalities, using a mini-
mum of props or special lighting, gave him the re-
putation of being a ‘‘modernist.’’ In his printing
procedures, however, Erfurth ignored contemporary
trends, remaining loyal throughout his career to
‘‘painterly’’ Pictorialist techniques that by 1920
were already considered old-fashioned. An experi-
menter in many photographic genres, Erfurth is
known today almost exclusively as a portraitist,
due in part to the uneven survival of his oeuvre
during the destruction of World War II.
Born in the Saxon city of Halle in 1874, Erfurth by
1884 was sent to school in Dresden, the old capital of
the kingdom of Saxony. Between 1892 and 1896 he
studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Dresden,
an experience that was to have a significant effect on
his aesthetics as a photographer. At the same time,
Erfurth was learning photographic techniques with
the Dresden court photographer Wilhelm Ho ̈ffert.
In 1896 he took over the J.S. Schro ̈der photographic
studio, moving his home and studio in 1906 to the
larger and more fashionable Palais Lu ̈ttichau.
Though Erfurth was making studio portraits by
the late 1890s, his early photographic practice was
quite diversified. By 1893 he began exhibiting with
societies of amateur photographers, showing staged
genre scenes of Thuringian peasants in traditional
costume. In Stuttgart in 1899, Erfurth submitted
five works: a genre scene, two nudes, a landscape,
and a still life (locations unknown). He exhibited no
portraits. Among Erfurth’s first photographs used
as book illustrations were several studio female
nudes, as well as outdoor nude studies of children
and adolescents for a popular book on pediatrics,
Dr. Carl Heinrich Stratz’sDer Ko ̈rper deines Kindes
(Stuttgart, 1903).
In his earliest surviving works, Erfurth was
already committed to the Pictorialist aesthetic that
swept through European photography by the turn
of the twentieth century. Both his landscapes and
portraits were often executed as gum bichromate or
oil pigment prints, techniques providing loose, at-
mospheric depictions and emphasizing volumes
over detail. Within a few years he began to favor
another ‘‘painterly’’ new process, bromoil printing,
and he experimented with Louis Lumie`re’s auto-
chromes, the first commercially viable process for
color photography. Throughout his career, how-
ever, Erfurth also made gelatin silver prints for
portraits of a documentary nature, such asOtto
Dix Teaching a Class in Figure Painting(1929).
Initially Erfurth’s studio portraits of male artists
and intellectuals depicted the subjects against a dark
background, often with attributes of their profes-
sions, such as a paintbrush, easel, or book. By 1920
Erfurth more often used a light background, elim-
inating all props and concentrating on the face and
upper body. Although Erfurth’s compositions
looked back to the traditions of nineteenth-century
German portrait painting, the avant-garde consid-
ered the photographer ‘‘modern’’ in his ability to
record definitively the personal essence of his sitters.
Thus Oskar Kokoschka, the youthful-looking crea-
tor of the lithographic seriesThe Dreaming Boys,
turns from the camera with a faraway expression.
By contrast, another Expressionist painter, Max
Beckmann, glowers balefully and frontally at the
camera, filling the picture space in a forceful image.
Unlike his contemporary, August Sander, who sys-
tematically photographed all German social types,
Erfurth had no explicit program. During the 1920s
he thought of creating aGallery of Portrait Heads of
My Time, but he did not pursue the idea consistently.
By 1908 Erfurth had also begun to take some of
the earliest photographs of dancers in motion. Con-
centrating on modern dance, Erfurth, over the next
two decades, photographed more than 20 dancers,
all female, some famous, like Mary Wigman, others
little remembered today. His goal was to produce a
sense of natural movement, even if blurred, using
artificial lighting. These images, rare today, in-
fluenced younger dance photographers, including
Erfurth’s pupil, Charlotte Rudolph. Erfurth also
photographed leading opera and theater perfor-
mers during this period.
Erfurth was probably the best-known portrait
photographer in Germany by the late 1920s; he wasERFURTH, HUGO