Heinrich Koch (photographer)

Terrace on the water

Pile of wood

Heinrich Koch: Hans Wittwer

Heinrich Koch (born August 20, 1896 in Uherské Hradiště , Austria-Hungary ; died March 1, 1934 in Prague ) was a Czech-German photographer and educator who was one of the protagonists of the New Vision in photography.

Life

Heinrich (Jindřich) Koch attended grammar school in Uherské Hradiště from 1908 to 1915. During the First World War , he studied art history and law in Vienna . Already in these years he was busy with sculpture . In 1918 he finally enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpture. He was to continue it in Prague in 1919 after leaving Vienna . However, it is uncertain whether he will finally complete it.

From the summer of 1922 Koch was a student at the State Bauhaus in Weimar and from 1925 - after the Bauhaus moved - in Dessau . After completing the compulsory preliminary course, he attended classes in the sculpture workshop from the winter semester 1922/23. Until 1928 he also experimented in the classes for wall painting , metal (then under the direction of László Moholy-Nagy ) and printing and advertising . Later he also became a student of the mural painting workshop, to which he belonged until his journeyman's examination in 1928. Musically, Koch was involved in the Bauhaus band.

After graduating from the Bauhaus, Koch went freelance as an interior designer. Due to the stock market crash on October 24, 1929 , however, he had to give up this activity due to a lack of orders, which is why he decided to start something new. At the end of 1929 and beginning of 1930 he became part of the photography class at the Burg Giebichenstein School of Applied Arts in Halle (Saale) , which has been headed by Hans Finsler since it was founded in 1927 . Finsler was considered one of the leading exponents of the New Vision. Koch, who had probably already been involved with photography at the Bauhaus, quickly took up the position of Finsler's assistant despite his lay status and found his own visual language. In the early days of his activity in Halle (Saale), he married the former Bauhaus member Benita Otte , who had been in charge of the weaving mill there since 1925. Both had met during Koch's time at the Bauhaus. Like several other Bauhaus members, Otte had moved from Weimar to Halle (Saale) because the increasing technical orientation of the Bauhaus seemed strange to her.

At the end of the winter semester 1931/32, Finsler was replaced by Koch as head of the photography class at Giebichenstein Castle. Finsler had decided to leave Halle (Saale) and switched to the Zurich School of Applied Arts . With Koch, the style in which the photography class was conducted changed, as he renounced formal training and, while acting in the background, mainly conveyed technical information. However, he only retained his managerial position until the spring of 1933, as the employees who had come from the Bauhaus were dismissed after the National Socialist German Workers' Party came to power . They also closed the photography class. Koch then moved to Prague with his wife, who was also affected by the Nazi measures, where he found a job as a photographer at the Prague National Museum in early 1934 . Shortly after this new beginning, Koch had a fatal accident on March 1, 1934, in a traffic accident in Prague. Benita Koch-Otte returned to Germany in the same year.

plant

Pile of wood. Heinrich Koch

Portrait of Hans Wittwer . Heinrich Koch

During Koch's relatively short creative period (1929–1934) around 400 photographs were taken that can be attributed to him so far. The product photography and portraits of Koch stand out most clearly, as his technical and creative skills are particularly pronounced in these areas. Due to the factual photography orientation of the photography class at Giebichenstein Castle, Koch also approached this area of ​​photography first - and with great success. But Koch also addressed landscape, urban and architectural photography as well as plant and animal photographs in his photographic work. He also dedicated some works to his place of residence Halle (Saale), for example there are photos of Giebichenstein Castle , the snow-covered government garden or the Halle-Leipzig airport restaurant designed by Hans Wittwer .

“In the few years that Koch was able to devote himself to photography, he barely had time to create a quantitatively extensive and qualitatively homogeneous oeuvre, and yet his works show a broad spectrum of photographic compositions that clearly reflect the most important trends in the orientate contemporary photography. "

For his work, Koch mainly took up creative elements of the New Photography , which was evident from the fact that the objects depicted mostly appear detached from the context and reproduced in narrow sections. This directs the gaze directly onto the surface, the shape and the structure of the motif. In addition to Hans Finsler , Albert Renger-Patzsch is also regarded as a formative role model for Koch's work.

“(...) essentially the work arises as the result of a stage in life and then breaks off. The work thus appears very compact and does not make it possible to identify trends in the development of photographic work. "

estate

There are no known negatives from Koch's estate. However, there are silver gelatine prints from the time the photos were taken, which passed into the possession of his wife after Koch's death. They were later split up and came to the Berlin Kicken Gallery, the Zimmer Gallery in Düsseldorf, and the historical collections of the von Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel in Bielefeld. Only in a few cases had Koch's photographs been given a title, which can be found handwritten on the back of the prints. Furthermore, due to his sudden death, it was no longer possible for him to organize his works, which were created between 1929 and 1934, which makes a clear chronological and thematic classification when processing the estate difficult.

The Moritzburg Foundation , the art museum of the State of Saxony-Anhalt, is keeping a large part of Heinrich Koch's estate in his former place of work in Halle (Saale). In 2012, the photo collection there received 230 pictures by Koch as a permanent loan from the Arkudes Foundation in Cologne, as the purchase of this comprehensive collection would have been too expensive for the foundation alone. The initiative to purchase the holdings by the Arkudes Foundation came from the Berlin gallery Kicken. With this permanent loan, the stock of Koch photographs of the Moritzburg Foundation was expanded. T. O. Immisch and Gunnar Lüsch published a selection of photographs, comprising a total of 144 photographs by Koch, for the first time in 2002.

literature

• TO Immisch, Gunnar Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch. Photographs 1929 to 1934 . Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle (Saale) 2002. ISBN 3-86105-078-1 .
• Jindřich Koch, Karel Herain, Ladislav Sutnar : Práce Jindřicha Kocha . Státní grafická škola 1935.

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Koch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Moritzburg Foundation - Photography Collection ( Memento from April 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
• Heinrich Koch at museum-digital

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 7.
2. ↑ Mitteldeutsche Zeitung of October 17, 2012: Moritzburg receives 230 pictures from Heinrich Koch
3. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 8.
4. ↑ Benita Koch-Otte , in: bauhaus-online.de ( Memento of the original from August 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 12.
6. ↑ Benita Koch-Otte , in: bauhaus-online.de ( Memento of the original from August 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 13.
8. ↑ Mitteldeutsche Zeitung of October 17, 2012: Moritzburg receives 230 pictures from Heinrich Koch
9. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 12.
10. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 13.
11. ↑ See Immisch / Lüsch (ed.): Heinrich Koch , p. 79.
12. ↑ New seeing: photography exhibition in the Moritzburg Halle. In: HalleSpektrum , March 5, 2013.
13. ↑ Mitteldeutsche Zeitung of October 17, 2012: Moritzburg receives 230 pictures from Heinrich Koch