Auguste Städele

Auguste Städele (* 1879 ; † 1966 ; born Hirnbein ) was a farmer and photographer based in the Allgäu .

Life

Auguste Städele came from the Hirnbein family from Missen and had eight siblings. In 1906 she married the future mayor of Missen, Franz Josef Städele, with whom she went on a honeymoon to Milan and then managed the Städelesche estate in Missen, which was expanded in 1910 by a so-called " return ". In the same year, their first child was born, who died in infancy; between 1911 and 1921 five more children - a daughter and four sons - were born. While her husband fought as a soldier in World War I , Auguste Städele continued to work on the farm and also continued her photographic work, which she had started before the outbreak of the war. She apparently gave up photography around 1930, and after the Second World War she sold or gave away her photographic equipment.

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In the years before the First World War, the village priest gave her a camera. Kaplan Scherer taught her the art of photography and she became the picture chronicler of her large family and her home. Auguste Städele documented the growing up of her five children, the work, festivals and customs of her village and its inhabitants. This is how numerous glass plate negatives were created from the period 1900 to 1920. Why Auguste Städele gave up her photographic activity in 1930 and abolished the equipment after the Second World War is not known. Apparently only the room in the courtyard that she used as a darkroom has survived .

In 2008, over 500 well-wrapped glass plate negatives were rediscovered in a threshing floor in the family estate. Auguste Städele took photos with at least four different cameras, as can be seen from the formats of the found plates. She used gelatin dry plates from various manufacturers, including Dr. Schleussner, Otto Kirschten from Eisenberg in Saxony-Anhalt , the Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation Berlin and purveyor to the court Paul Teufel in Stuttgart . Hand prints were found from only 68 of these photographs. Apparently Auguste Städele did not continuously document her recordings. The first dated photograph that can be assigned to her is from 1898, the most recent from 1930. Auguste Städele apparently took the majority of her pictures before the First World War. In her open-air studio in the garden of the Missen farm, she used a hand-painted studio curtain that has not been preserved, but often posed the people she portrayed in front of a natural background.

The photographic legacy of the farmer Auguste Städele occupies a unique position in the history of culture and photography, after all, the works date from a time when amateur photography had not yet established itself in the general population. At that time, photography was more of a bourgeois, male activity. The recordings are the earliest known from the surrounding Bergstätt area, as the area north of the Great Alpsee is also known, and offer a unique insight into rural and rural life in the Allgäu at the beginning of the 20th century.

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• Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer in Missen Special exhibition in the Allgäu mountain farming museum
• Report about the exhibition and the photographer in the Allgäuer Anzeigeeblatt , April 18, 2009
• Homeland Allgäu: Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer
• Matthias Leybrand: Sensational photographs from the Allgäu ( Memento from February 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) in: Capriccio, Bayerisches Fernsehen , February 17, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jürgen Schmid, Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer , Hephaistos-Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-931951-40-5 , p. 7
2. ↑ Jürgen Schmid, Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer , Hephaistos-Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-931951-40-5 , p. 9
3. ↑ Jürgen Schmid, Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer , Hephaistos-Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-931951-40-5 , p. 69
4. ↑ Jürgen Schmid, Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer , Hephaistos-Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-931951-40-5 , p. 79
5. ↑ Chronicler of a bygone world - The photo pioneer Auguste Staedele In: Between Spessart and Karwendel , Bayerisches Fernsehen , September 14, 2008
6. ↑ Jürgen Schmid, Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer , Hephaistos-Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-931951-40-5 , p. 78 and passim

literature

• Jürgen Schmid: Auguste Städele - farmer and photographer. Paperback, Hephaistos-Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-931951-40-5 .
• Jürgen Schmid: The farmers' eyes. The private photo studio of the Allgäu village photographer Auguste Städele at the beginning of the 20th century . In: Bavarian Yearbook for Folklore . Edition 2010, ISSN  0067-4729 .