Elsa Thiemann

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Elsa Thiemann, around 1929–30

Elsa Thiemann (born February 7, 1910 in Thorn-Mocker , West Prussia , † November 15, 1981 in Hamburg ) was a German photographer .

Life

Elsa Thiemann was born as the sixth child of the married couple Wilhelm and Helene Franke. The father, a real estate agent, enabled his wife and children, six girls and one boy, to have a well-to-do bourgeois existence. In 1921 the family moved to Berlin-Neukölln . Despite the changes that the First World War brought with it economically, politically and socially, the father, who now owns two apartment buildings in Berlin-Neukölln, was able to secure the family's standard of living. Elsa Franke attended the Municipal Lyceum II Neukölln from 1922 to 1926 . Her drawing teacher there, the painter Margarete Kubicka (1891–1984), recognized Elsa's talent for drawing. Margarete Kubicka and her husband, the expressionist painter Stanislaw Kubicki , had close ties with the Berlin Dadaists . There were strong contrasts between this artistic world of her drawing teacher and her own sheltered existence as a wealthy bourgeois daughter. Strongly influenced by Margarete Kubicka, Elsa Franke knew that she wanted to work practically as an artist.

Supported by her family, after completing secondary school in Berlin-Charlottenburg, she first attended the Berlin School of Applied Arts and Crafts and then the United State Schools for Free and Applied Arts (VS), a predecessor of the University of the Arts (UdK). Between 1929 and 1931 she studied at the Bauhaus Dessau . Your teacher in the basic course was Josef Albers , in typography and advertising graphics Joost Schmidt and in photography Walter Peterhans . In addition, she attended the free painting classes with Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee . In 1930 she met her future husband there, the painter Hans Thiemann . After receiving her Bauhaus diploma with the number 59 on July 14, 1931, she returned to Berlin.

She then worked as a freelance press photographer in Berlin and became a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture in 1934 during the Nazi era . In 1944, in order to avoid military service, she became the editorial secretary in the Berlin branch of the Hamburg publishing house Hoffmann und Campe .

After the war, Elsa Thiemann worked again as a freelance press photographer. She and Hans Thiemann married in 1947. The “ Britzer Kreis ”, a group of artists and intellectuals they co-founded , included their former drawing teacher Margarete Kubicka. They moved to Hamburg in 1960 after Hans Thiemann had received a professorship at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) there. After moving, Elsa Thiemann no longer worked as a professional photographer. In the four years after her husband's death on July 28, 1977, she looked after his artistic and photographic legacy.

plant

Elsa Thiemann carnival masks or 3 cut onions, 1930s

Time at the Bauhaus

Elsa Thiemann's work is shaped to a large extent by her studies at the Bauhaus Dessau and especially by Walter Peterhans . He set up the photography department as part of the advertising workshop . As a representative of the New Objectivity , he attached great importance to the chemical and physical principles of photography, but above all to image composition and the selection of the right object. This was reflected in the so-called puzzle pictures, which Elsa Thiemann had begun to create in her Bauhaus years, but which continued to be realized in the following years. Starting with the tasks given to her by Peterhans, she tried to implement criteria such as material fairness through correct tonal implementation of form and structures or the planned later use of the recordings in advertising , despite the deficiencies in the recording and enlargement technology . These recordings show how Elsa Thiemann was influenced by the New Objectivity through Walter Peterhans. What stands for: Through the choice of the image section , the object loses its original shape, it takes on a new shape, as well as the strong emphasis on graphic and structural elements. The wallpaper designs that were created with the help of photograms during her years at the Bauhaus between 1930 and 1931 were significantly more representational in contrast to the Bauhaus wallpapers , their preferred motifs were flowers, fruits and stems, they often show a floral and ornamental character, the reminds of pre-modern styles , from Biedermeier to Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau . At the same time, however, the use of photograms indicates that Elsa Thiemann's work was integrated into contemporary photography at the time. This also results in points of contact with photographers such as Man Ray or Andreas Feininger .

Elsa Thiemann window cleaner at Kottbusser Tor, after 1945

Photojournalistic and freelance work

When Elsa Thiemann began to work as a freelance photojournalist in the early 1930s, the feature pages of the newspapers were her field of activity. She was free to choose her subjects and write the texts herself. There is a poetically compassionate moment in her documentary way of working. When she portrayed people, she did not try to "shoot" them, to "expose" them. She left them their dignity. This, as well as the fact that Elsa Thiemann presented lost views of her place of residence in Berlin, represents a connecting moment to the work of Eugène Atget . In some of her works, such as "Window cleaners at Kottbusser Tor", influences of the Russian constructivists , like Alexander Rodchenko . She used the means of elevated or bird's eye view, but also intentional tilting of the camera. Not only people, but also stationary objects such as houses seem to be in motion. While studying at the Bauhaus, Elsa Thiemann taught graphic vision in structures. Examples of this are her wall pictures, such as “The destroyed front building gave the rear wall some air”. This picture shows analogies to the early post-war pictures taken in Berlin by the photographer Arno Fischer . A shot such as “Pistolenschütze” shows her involvement in international photography after the Second World War . Comparisons to the work of William Klein , such as the shot "Pistol 2, near the Bowery " can be seen.

Artist portraits

Her artist portraits, which were mainly created in the 1940s and 50s, have analogies but also differences to the self-portraits of the photographer, who observes her likeness and does not intervene instructively, in the way they were created, in the use almost exclusively of daylight Recognize Gisèle Freund's early work . In the years around the Second World War, she mainly photographed writers and visual artists who were mostly known to her. However, while Gisele Freund took her portraits exclusively in color and placed the person to be portrayed in the center of her picture and a familiarity between the photographer and the object being photographed was clearly recognizable, Elsa Thiemann observed her counterpart from a distance. It mainly shows the artists in the vicinity of their studios, and often enough even the workpiece comes to the fore.

exhibition

2015: Feminizing Photography. Women behind the camera . Galerie Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs, Wiesbaden.

literature

  • Roswitha Fricke ( editor ) bauhaus photography , Düsseldorf 1982.
  • Wulf Herzogenrath (comp.), Institute for Foreign Relations Stuttgart Bauhaus Photography , Stuttgart 1983.
  • Annemarie Jaeggi and Margot Schmidt (eds.) Elsa Thiemann: Photographer Bauhaus and Berlin, exhibition catalog, Berlin 2004.
  • Jeaninne Fiedler (Red.), Bauhaus-archiv Berlin Photography at the Bauhaus , Berlin 1990.
  • Foundation House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany (Ed.) Women ́s lens - female photographers: female photographers 1940 to 1950 , Cologne 2001.
  • Museum Folkwang (Ed.) Taking photos meant taking part: Photographers of the Weimar Republic , Essen 1994.

Web links

Commons : Elsa Thiemann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Window cleaner at Kottbusser Tor", after 1945, Berlinische Galerie, cat. 64.
  2. ↑ "The rear wall got some air from the destroyed front building" after 1945, Berlinische Galerie, cat. 57.
  3. ↑ "Pistol Schützen", 1950s, bauhaus archive Berlin, cat. 80.
  4. ^ "Gun 2, Near the Bowery," New York 1955, The George Eastman House Collection, 85: 1058: 0003.
  5. ↑ Landscapes to Kneel Down in FAZ from April 29, 2015, page 34.
personal data
SURNAME Thiemann, Elsa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer, photojournalist and artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Thorn-Mocker , West Prussia
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1981
Place of death Hamburg