James Abbe

James Abbe (born July 17, 1883 in Alfred , Maine , † November 1, 1973 in San Francisco ) was an American photojournalist and radio host . He gained fame by portraying practically all of the dictators of the time - Hitler, Stalin, Franco and Mussolini - in the 1930s.

Life

Abbe grew up in Virginia . He started taking photos when he was 15; Little is known about his training. In 1910 he got his first permanent job as a picture reporter with the Washington Post . He went about 1918-19 in the Hollywood of the silent film era and later to New York City where he wanted to make a name for himself as a photographer. Illustrations of famous personalities and photo reports from the film and theater world became his specialty.

He quickly succeeded in becoming one of the most important international photojournalists . This also gave him orders that took him away from the stage and film and more into politics. From 1923 he was used in Europe, which is why he first moved to Paris and in 1927 to Berlin. From these fixed points he worked as a photographer and reporter with a European sphere of activity for various well-known magazines.

In 1936 he left Berlin, moved back to America and ended his career as a photographer a year later. However, he remained loyal to journalism and commented on world events as a radio presenter and later as one of America's first television presenters until the 1960s. At the age of 80 he retired.

Abbe was married and had three children.

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Abbe's journalistic life's work can be divided into three phases, the first two of which establish his fame as a photographer.

In his first creative phase in America, Abbe also devoted himself photographically to his passion, film, theater and dance. In his first reports he showed both the big stars and the now long-forgotten starlets of Hollywood in film recordings and the greats of Broadway in New York, on or - better and often more successfully - behind the stages. Abbe is said to have been attractive, sociable and fun-loving, which certainly contributed to the fact that his work made him a bit more successful than the competition. His pictures of Charlie Chaplin on the set of The Kid , of Fred Astaire , Josephine Baker , Mae West and Rudolph Valentino became so well known that they became icons of modern imagery.

The carefree “golden” 20s prevailed, high-circulation magazines such as Vogue , Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair were able to serve their image-loving readership with his help. For an excellent photojournalist of the time like Abbe, it was important to seek out strange realities for his clients and to track down exotic things for the reader. Therefore, his assignments soon took him geographically beyond the USA and thematically beyond the atmosphere of glamor.

Even when he later worked as a political journalist in Paris , Berlin or Moscow , he never lost interest in theater, film and art. When he was sent to Moscow, he also portrayed Russian artists such as B. the film director Sergej Eisenstein . In Paris he showed his readers how it was in front of and behind the scenes of the most revealing revue theaters of the time. B. the famous Folies Bergère received . In Germany he also made portraits of Thomas Mann - less well-known and only recently rediscovered for the public and very remarkable - who had the reputation of being a cumbersome model that was difficult to access for any photographer.

Abbe's second creative phase as a political journalist can be started from 1925. After reporting in Cuba and Mexico , where he brought pictures of the Mexican Revolution home, he went - remarkably together with his family - permanently to Europe and with his photo reports became the chronicler of the political upheavals there. Mostly "armed" with a Kodak folding camera , he documented as a "mad reporter" (a term coined at the time) the scenes of the Spanish Civil War , aspects of the cultural life of the Soviet Union , especially the Moscow of the Stalin era and the last years of the Weimar period Republic . In the 20s and 30s, Abbe was considered to be one of the most important international photographers and photojournalists , who did not have to shy away from comparison with today's more well-known figures such as Alfred Eisenstaedt , Erich Salomon , Umbo or Felix H. Man .

In his most difficult assignments, James Abbe carelessly and obsessively approached the dictators of Europe - Hitler , Mussolini , Franco ; He also photographed other political figures such as Chancellor Franz von Papen and Hermann Göring as Reich Minister.

In 1932, James Abbe was the only American to receive exclusive permission to photograph Stalin in the Kremlin in order to credibly demonstrate his well-being to the world. In the German press it was rumored that Stalin was ill and even had a paralyzed hand from birth. This rumor could only be credibly cleared out of the world by a Soviet journalist who was not controlled by propaganda , so ideally an American journalist - Abbe, who was at the height of his career, got the job with this clever argumentation. He was allowed to spend 20 minutes in the Holy of Holies of the Kremlin, Stalin's study, the exact location of which no one was allowed to know, and mastered his task with flying colors - in the interests of his clients and probably also in the interests of Stalin.

In 1934 his book I Photograph Russia was published about his experiences in Russia. This work contains around 80 photos by James Abbe.

The world-famous result, a portrait of the well-humored, powerful-looking Stalin under the portrait of Karl Marx, can be judged as pleasing and uncritically uncritical from today's historical perspective. The achievement of having created a unique contemporary document sets Abbe apart from the crowd of his competitors and in the role of the unforgotten chronicler.

The portraits of Stalin made the front page of the New York Times . Abbe's recordings from this time have been published internationally: in Vogue and Vanity Fair, in Vu and London Magazine . In Germany of the late Weimar era, his pictures illustrated reports from the magazines “ Die Dame ”, “ Uhu ” and the “ Berliner Illustrirten Zeitung ”, which were located in the then world press city of Berlin .

For the third creative phase, Abbe, who was a thoroughbred journalist, changed the medium. After his return from Europe in 1937 (other sources cite 1939), he gave up photography, but stayed in the industry and continued to work in radio. First he became active on the radio, where he received his own program James Abbe Observes . He later established itself with its own mission for the just become the mass medium developing television . It wasn't until he turned 80 that James Abbe ended his career as a journalist.

Meaning and effect

In about two extremely productive decades, Abbe set new standards for image reporting of his time and for the history of photography as a whole. Although he was one of the most important international photo journalists of the 1920s, the life and work of James Abbe have been almost forgotten today.

It was not until the turn of the year 2004/2005 that James Abbe from the Cologne Museum Ludwig was honored as one of the most important photojournalists of the 20th century, for the first time in Germany in a solo exhibition. “Shooting Stalin”, the title of the exhibition, gave a comprehensive insight into the eventful life of this photo journalist.

In addition to his photographic oeuvre , recordings of his radio reports have also been preserved and shown in the exhibition.

literature

• Stars of the Twenties . New York 1975 (new edition of his glamor pictures from the twenties)
• Shooting Stalin. The “wonderful” years of the photographer James Abbe . Göttingen 2004. ISBN 3-86521-043-0 (exhibition catalog)

Web links

Commons : James Abbe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about James Abbe in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by James Abbe at perlentaucher.de