Hans Finsler

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Hans Finsler (born December 7, 1891 in Heilbronn , † April 3, 1972 in Zurich ) was a Swiss photographer and teacher at the Zurich School of Applied Arts . He is counted among the most important representatives of New Photography and New Objectivity in photography.

Life

Finsler, whose father was Swiss, grew up in Germany. From 1911 to 1914 he studied architecture in Stuttgart and Munich and from 1915 to 1919 art history in Munich and Berlin , where he was influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin's "Sehschule" . From 1922 to 1932 he worked as a librarian and lecturer at the Burg Giebichenstein School of Applied Arts in Halle (Saale) . The lack of documentation about the students' work led him to photography in an autodidactic way. In 1927 he was able to set up a photography class. In 1929 he was involved with a large collection of works in the "Film and Photo" exhibition of the Werkbund in Stuttgart. There they became aware of the only Swiss photographer.

In 1932 Alfred Altherr won him over as a teacher at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, where he established the first photography class, from which numerous famous photographers emerged. In order to supplement his initial salary as an assistant teacher, he opened his own studio for product and advertising photography. Finsler's apartment and studio were in the Werkbundsiedlung Neubühl - Wollishofen . Many Swiss products (embru furniture, Fülscher cookbook , Landi chair , Langenthal porcelain , etc.) and modern architectural buildings (Neubühl-Wollishofen, Doldertal settlement Zurich, etc.) only became known to the general public through his photographs. His close-ups celebrated materiality and substance and helped to anchor the image of the then proverbial Swiss quality in the collective memory.

Well-known photographs of the Swiss National Exhibition of 1939 come from Finsler. Together with the typographer and designer Alfred Willimann , he made a significant contribution to the visual communication of modernism at the Kunstgewerbeschule by combining photography and graphics . He worked as a photography teacher until 1957. From 1946 to 1955, Hans Finsler was chairman of the Swiss Werkbund (SWB). Together with Rosellina Burri-Bischof , Manuel Gasser and others, he was one of the founding members of the « Foundation for Photography », which was established on May 4, 1971 .

plant

With his teaching activities in Halle and Zurich, he contributed to the development of a product photography that broke away from traditional standards of value and followed the laws of things and photography itself:

There I asked myself: How do you have to photograph things that have been created according to certain formal laws? Before my experiments, these things were improperly photographed by a professional photographer using the template that was common at the time. My first attempts no longer exist. They were rejected, even within the school. They were too unfamiliar. But photography in connection with the things to be recorded became a fascinating discovery for me. If I had completed an apprenticeship in photography, I would never have come to the same results. I became a photographer by force. Schoolchildren came, and the first class for object photography was created at an arts and crafts school.

The years after the First World War marked a new beginning in many areas. You asked about the basics. For example, one asked: What is a house? What is a chair? What is color At first I asked quite unsystematically: What is photography? What are the laws of the things I ingest? Is there a valuation of things in photography? Does photography see differently than the eye? (Hans Finsler)

From then on, the object itself or its materiality determined how it had to be photographed, so that, for example, the photo of a silk fabric appeared to the viewer as if it were the silk fabric itself. Finsler's black-and-white pictures often appear like abstract paintings due to the ingenious arrangement of simple objects, sophisticated lighting and unconventional camera angles. The photojournalism that emerged in the 1940s with dynamic photographs of people - in contrast to its students - no longer had any influence on Finsler's work.

Exhibitions

  • 1929 Exhibition "Film und Foto" of the Werkbund in Stuttgart .
  • His estate was donated to the Moritzburg Foundation in 1987 . A few hundred works can be researched on museum-digital .
  • 1991 Exhibition Hans Finsler - New Paths of Photography , Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, from April 14th to May 26th 1991
  • 2006 Exhibition of Hans Finsler and Swiss Photo Culture , Work - Photo Class - Modern Design 1932-1960 , Museum of Design in Zurich from June 10th to September 17th.

Known students

literature

  • 1952 Biennial . Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. DU magazine 1952 No. 9
  • About Edward Steichen . DU booklet 1962 No. 1
  • The picture of photography . DU issue 1964 No. 3
  • Mein Weg zur Fotografie (1971) New edition, Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-85842-002-6
  • Hans Finsler - New Paths in Photography (1991), exhibition catalog, Halle Saale 1991
  • Thilo Koenig, Martin Gasser (ed.): Hans Finsler and Swiss Photo Culture. Factory, photo class, modern design 1932-1960 . gta Verlag Zurich 2006. ISBN 978-3-85676-178-3 .
  • Dirk Schaal , Jo Schaller (ed.): Electricity in historical photographs by Emil Leitner and Hans Finsler. 1920-1930. Stekovics, Halle 2001, ISBN 978-3-932863-83-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Commercial Register of the Canton of Zurich: Diary Register Files 1971, No. 4434.
personal data
SURNAME Finsler, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss photographer and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Heilbronn
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 1972
Place of death Zurich