Hanna Seewald

Johanna Josephine Seewald (born February 13, 1899 in Krefeld , † August 26, 1992 in Munich ) was a German photographer .

Life and works

Hanna Seewald was the daughter of the tapestry merchant Hans Seewald and his wife Else, née Reichel, who both came from Cologne . She completed the daughter's school in Karlsruhe before the family moved to Düsseldorf . Seewald, their first photographic experiments with a baseboard camera of Ernemann made, first learned at the request of her father accounting. After that, however, she implemented her actual career aspiration and attended Erwin Quedenfeldt's private photography school in Düsseldorf in 1920/21 . In the following time she worked as a photographer in Alma Maier's portrait studio in Düsseldorf, before starting her studies at the State Higher Technical School for Photo Technology in Munich (later: Bavarian State College for Photography) with Hans Spoerl in 1922 . In 1924/25 she was a photographer at the Zeppelin airship construction company in Friedrichshafen . Then she became an assistant at the Munich photography school. In 1932 she became a technical college teacher.

In the 1930s, Seewald's works were shown at several exhibitions, around 1933 in the Städtisches Museum Düsseldorf and the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, as well as in the Ulm Municipal Museum and the State Trade Museum in Stuttgart . In 1934, Seewald's pictures were on view in the Berlin Art Library . Another exhibition of her photographs took place in Rome in the 1930s .

Her apartment and part of her archive fell victim to the war in 1944. The school building in which she taught was confiscated by the American military administration in 1945. Classes began again in 1946/47. The provisional headmaster was Franz Grainer . After his death, Hanna Seewald took over this position in 1948. From 1953 to 1965 she was a full-time headmistress. In her later years she mainly took portraits.

Her students included Helmut Gernsheim , Fritz Henle , Dieter Hinrichs , Ingeborg Hoppe , Lotte Jacobi , Peter Keetman , Walter E. Lautenbacher , Floris M. Neusüss , Wolfgang Reisewitz , Fee Schlapper and Reinhart Wolf .

The State Academy for Photo Design in Munich keeps the archive of the photographer, who was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1966 . Original recordings of Seewald can be found in the Munich City Museum , the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the University of Texas in Austin .

literature

• House of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany (ed.): Women objective. Photographers 1940 to 1950 , Bonn 2001, ISBN 3-87909-752-6 and ISBN 3-87909-754-2 , p. 141
• Ulrich Pohlmann:  Seewald, Hanna. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 156 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ NDB article , accessed on November 27, 2018