Deutsche Lichtbild, who hired Hajek-Halke to create
layouts and montages for his publication.
Hajek-Halke was enamored with the subject of
the female nude throughout his career and this sub-
ject constituted the first of his published photos in
the late 1920s. One of his most renowned,Defama-
tion(1926–1927), features a bird’s eye view of a nude
model’s torso, cropped, enlarged, and diagonally
superimposed across a busy Berlin street. In the
lower left, three top-hatted men engaged in discus-
sion are balanced by three smaller figures just visible
in the upper right. It is difficult to discern if the
cryptic title refers to the modern defamation of the
once ‘‘natural’’ landscape represented by the model’s
organic form, to the conversation of the top-hatted
trio in the lower corner, or to the photographer’s
refusal to follow the rules of ‘‘straight’’ photogra-
phy. InDefamation, the model’s rounded curves are
reiterated in the tires of the cars at the top of the
scene and in the men’s hats, yet her organic form
seems otherwise out of place, writ large amidst an
urban modernity that literally passes over and by
her. Thus, if Hajek-Halke is to be viewed as ahead of
his time for his atypical technical innovation, it is
perhaps equally important to note that his frequent
formal opposition of presumably ‘‘natural’’ female
forms with all things cultural, modern, or intellectual
marked him as a man entirelyofhis time.
Like so many artists who remained in Germany
throughout the Third Reich, the degree of Hajek-
Halke’s complicity with, and resistance to, the Nazi
regime is difficult to ascertain in historical retro-
spect. Although he joined the National Socialist
Party in 1933, Hajek-Halke shortened his last
name to ‘‘Halke’’ later that year and moved to
Lake Constance in the Bodensee region in a move
that some historians have viewed as a kind of
transgressive ‘‘inner exile.’’ Proclaiming his outrage
at the fact that Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry
requested him to falsify documentary photographs,
Hajek-Halke turned his attention to the less politi-
cally-charged field of zoological macro-photogra-
phy. At the same time, however, he won a gold
medal at the 1933 International Photography exhi-
bition and continued to write how-to articles for
amateur photographer periodicals in the field of
small animal macro-photography. During his
years at Lake Constance, Hajek-Halke developed
a passion for natural science with a particular inter-
est in herpetology. In the mid-1930s, he contributed
photographs and essays to a Natural Science news-
paper and traveled to Brazil to conduct research at
the Butantan Snake Farm. Though he considered
emigrating to Brazil, Hajek-Halke returned to Ger-
many in 1938 and to more politically sensitive work
creating aerial photographs for the Dornier-Wer-
ken airplane manufacturing firm in Friedrichsha-
fen. This work was interrupted by World War II
and, ultimately, by the photographer’s internment
as a French prisoner of war in 1944–1945.
As was the case for many German photographers in
the 1930s, Hajek-Halke lost all his equipment in the
war and as a result, channeled his postwar energy into
the founding of a snake-breeding farm that produced
snake products and medical leeches for the pharmaceu-
tical industry. He began renewed attempts at painting
but was quickly drawn back into his lifelong interest in
experimental photography. Hajek-Halke joined Otto
Steinert’s avant-garde fotoform group in 1950 and in
1955, was appointed as a Lecturer in Graphic Design
and Photography at West Berlin’s Academy of Fine
Arts, a post he held for more than a decade.
In his critically acclaimed 1955 book, Hajek-
Halke noted that its purpose was to ‘‘stimulate
the interested viewer and show him as concrete
pictures those things which he can perceive at any
time in his closest surroundings’’ (Hajek-Halke,
Experimentelle Fotografie1955, unpaginated pre-
face). When considered in tandem with his
expressed desire to resume the photographic ex-
periments of the 1920s’ Dessau Bauhaus, it is
clear that Hajek-Halke’s later work represents the
successful synthesis of his early experimental ima-
gery with his World War II era experience in aerial
photography and scientific macro-photography. In
the decades preceding his death in 1983, Hajek-
Halke’s continued aesthetic innovation and dedica-
tion as a teacher won him many awards, including
the Cultural Prize for German Photography and
the coveted David Octavius Hill Medal. His work
has been acquired by New York’s Museum of
Modern Art, Germany’s Folkwang Museum, Kest-
ner Museum, Berlin Kunstbibliothek, and France’s
Pompidou Center, among others.
In 1964, art historian Franz Roh described the
process of viewing Hajek-Halke’s photographs as
necessarily challenging. He noted in the introduc-
tion toLichtgrafik,
One is disposed... not only to accept them in detail, since
they contain both macro- and microscopic statements, as
it were. Bold chiaroscuro configurations are impinged
upon by smaller flourishes, by light of increasing and
diminishing intensity. The most diverse linear particles of
light and form are permeated by every conceivable
nuance of shading. The eye is led by stages from the purest
white, via light, cloudy opacities, to a wide range of
medium greys and an abundance of blacks—a profusion
which effectively avoids the purely decorative.
(Hajek-Halke,Lichtgraphik, 1964 unpaginated pre-
face)HAJEK-HALKE, HEINZ