Josef Stoffels

Gustav Knepper power plant of the Adolf von Hansemann colliery , photographed by Josef Stoffels in 1959. In the foreground, his Borgward Isabella as a recurring identification mark .

Josef Stoffels (born April 27, 1893 in Essen ; † September 1, 1981 there ) was a German industrial and documentary photographer .

Life

Josef Stoffels was a trained upholsterer before he got into photography as an amateur in the 1910s. Then he started his own business as a freelance photographer. In 1937 he was employed by the Fried. Krupp AG employed as an industrial photographer. His clients included the steel industry, other commercial enterprises and the British military government. In 1948 he passed the master's examination as a photographer at the Düsseldorf Chamber of Crafts. Especially in the 1950s, Stoffels photographed almost all 150 small and large mines in the Ruhr area and some in other German regions. His motifs also included portraits of members of the military and the food that was destroyed and rebuilt after the Second World War.

Stoffel's estate is kept in the photo archive of the Ruhrland Museum and is considered an important document in industrial photography in the post-war period. His estate is in the photographic collection of the Ruhr Museum in Essen.

Special exhibitions

• 2018: Josef Stoffels. Coal mine. Photographs from the Ruhr area , Ruhr Museum , Essen.

Publications

• 1959: The coal mine. Ruhr, Aachen, Lower Saxony. The face of the surface facilities in the second half of the 20th century. Industriedruck Essen, 1959. [only with black and white photographs]
• 1963: Essen: 30 color photographs . Andermann Verlag, Munich; Captions in de./en./fr./nl.

Literature, source

• Ulrich Borsdorf (Ed.): Josef Stoffels. Mines. Industrial photography from the mid-20th century. Essen, Ruhrland Museum 1990.
• Josef Stoffels. Coal mine. Photographs from the Ruhr area. Klartext, Essen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8375-1893-1 .