famous painter Franz von Stuck emphasized pho-
tography’s impact on art. Having taught portrait
photography at the Bavarian State School of Pho-
tography, he was named Professor of Fine Art Pho-
tography at the Academy of Graphics and Book
Art in Leipzig in 1913—the first professoral seat in
art photography in Germany. The other, Erwin
Quedenfeldt in Dusseldorf, was not as lucky; he
had wanted to integrate his private school of Fine
Art Photography into the local School of Arts and
Craft, then under the reign of the well-known
designer Peter Behrens, but he had to give up these
plans after Behrens’ move to Berlin in 1908. Que-
denfeldt,achemistbyprofession,inventedaprinting
processandwasbusyinventoryingruralarchitecture
in the Lower Rhine area. In Vienna, the Staatliche
Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt (State Gra-
phic Teaching and Research Faculty), founded in
1888, still concentrated on the technical side of the
medium, expanding to art only after 1918, mostly
under the influence of Rudolf Koppitz.
Both Eugene and Quedenfeldt, as well as the
portraitist Hugo Erfurth, had prepared the road to
modernism in photography by introducing high
contrasts and plain white backgrounds into their
work long before these practices were common.
On the other hand, the work of two of the most
important of the German modernists—August San-
der and Albert Renger-Patzsch—is not explicable
without noting their backgrounds in the Fine Art
movement. While Sander had tried to establish him-
self as a professional Fine Art Photographer before
World War I, Renger-Patzsch came from an ama-
teur background, his father being a widely pub-
lished author on technical aspects of photography,
like gum-printing. In 1925, August Sander was
encouraged by some friends from the Cologne art
scene to reprint his old portraits on technical paper
and to collect them under a sociological scheme. In
less than four years, he had identified subjects that
he thought represented Germany, his concept in-
corporating portraiture as well as architectural
photography. When his first book appeared in
1929 under the title ofAntlitz der Zeit(Face of
Time), it was acclaimed with great applause as a
mirror of German society. Albert Renger-Patzsch
had appeared on the scene just one year before with
his bookDie Welt ist scho ̈n(The World is Beauti-
ful), which received similar fame, although its title
was rejected by nearly all critics.
Albert Renger-Patzsch had brought straight
photography to Germany in the manner executed
a decade earlier by Paul Strand: images of techni-
cal, natural, and artificial objects depicted from
low distance under sharp light with overall deli-
cacy in showing surfaces and detail. Recognition-
for Renger-Patzsch came precisely at the time
when avant-garde painters had switched to a style
namedNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity), which
applied notions about realistic representation to
painting as obviously derived from photography.
The climate of these developments was felt more
strongly at several art schools and academies of
the time in Germany and Austria, one of which
has lent its name to a number of stylistic ap-
proaches: the Bauhaus. For the first nine of its
14 years of existence, photography was an integral
part only of the basic (foundation) course at the
Bauhaus. Masters like Georg Muche and La ́szlo ́
Moholy-Nagy introduced the medium to their stu-
dents as a means of visual training, a practice that
can be traced in the work of avant-garde lumin-
aries like Umbo (Otto Umbehr) or Irene and the
Austrian Herbert Bayer.
When Moholy-Nagy began teaching at the Des-
sau Bauhaus, his wife Lucia Moholy turned from
her work in the promotion of literature and took up
the documentation of her husband’s paintings, the
designs of students and other teachers, and with a
long series of architectural photographs of the new
Bauhaus buildings at Dessau. She also did Moholy-
Nagy’s darkroom work, reproducing his photo-
grams, preparing his books for print, and advising
him on technical details for his camera photo-
graphs. For several decades, her work languished
in the shadow of her husband’s huge and influential
œuvre but, according to the recollections of various
Bauhaus students, Lucia Moholy was equally influ-
ential on their photographic practice.
When the Moholys left the Bauhaus in 1927,
Joost Schmidt taught a class in advertising and
photography, again as part of the foundation
course. In 1929, Schmidt invited Walter Peterhans
to start a class in photography, in fact the only
photography course at the Bauhaus, which contin-
ued until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Peter-
hans’s curriculum followed guidelines well known
to photography students all over Germany: meth-
ods of developing film and prints; studies in densi-
tometry, photograms, setting of light; and the main
uses of the medium. The only truly modern curri-
culum in photography was taught just a few miles
away from Dessau, at the arts-and-crafts school at
Burg Giebichenstein in Halle. Following an ab-
orted career as an art historian, Hans Finsler, ini-
tially the school’s librarian, designed a modern
curriculum based on photography’s unique, in-
trinstic qualities. In Halle, Finsler was unable to
fully explore his ideas, but with his departure for
Zurich he was to become the most influental tea-GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, PHOTOGRAPHY IN