Karl Spieß (photographer)
Karl Spieß (born August 16, 1891 in Hartha ; † November 22, 1945 in the special camp Jamlitz ) was a German photographer .
Life
Karl Spieß was born as the only child of a Harthaer photographer. The musically gifted boy actually wanted to become a musician, he played the piano and violin. A visual artist would also have been an option for him, as he drew excellently and attended a private drawing school in Leipzig. His father's poor health forced him to start an apprenticeship as a photographer.
In 1914 he took part in the First World War, but was critically wounded by a bullet through the chest in September. He survived, became a prisoner of war and was hospitalized in Switzerland in December 1916 because of his heart condition. At the beginning of May 1918 he was brought back to Germany. In the French captivity he drew a lot. In Switzerland he trained as a photographer and made his master's degree.
When he returned to his hometown Hartha, he took over the studio of his late father, built a new business with state-of-the-art equipment and quickly developed into an outstanding photographer personality. Spieß was friends with artists as far as Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz.
In the Weimar Republic , Spieß was active in an organization for German war invalids and in this function joined the NSDAP in 1933 . In 1934 he asked to be released from NSDAP functions and resigned from his part-time job as administrator of the Office of War Victims in February 1935. He was secretly listening to the BBC's "enemy channel" .
The Soviet secret service NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs / Interior Ministry of the USSR) arrested Spieß on June 27, 1945 and took him to a special Soviet camp. He came over Döbeln and Dresden to the camp at Frankfurt / Oder and after its dissolution by Jamlitz into camp no. 6 . The Jamlitz site did not survive Spieß. Despite requests for support from his wife Maria, he was not released. His business and his property were expropriated, later given back because of "minor Nazi burden". There was no legal review of the guilt allegations. There is no grave of Karl Spieß. His wife Maria never received an official death notice. Nor did she know where her husband had gone. She emigrated to Canada in 1954 and died there in 1982.
Karl Spieß had two sons, the first fell in World War II . The second son, Fritz Spiess , born in 1925 , immigrated to Canada in 1951 and became one of the most important cameramen in the country.
plant
Spieß's photographs are to be located in the New Objectivity style . In terms of the artisanal and photographic approach, he is comparable to August Sander , but without his systematic, typologizing approach.
Parts of his work are in Stephen Bulger's gallery in Toronto , Canada . The gallery exhibited pictures by Karl Spieß in an exhibition about him in May 2018. The approximately 250 glass plate negatives rescued by [(Dietmar Riemann)] were taken over in 2018 by the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI) of the National Gallery of Canada in their Bestad in Ottawa. A picture of Karl Spieß will appear in the CPI's catalog book "The Extended Moment" in 2018 on one page together with a photograph by August Sander.
literature
- Dietmar Riemann : Karl Spieß 1891–1945. A Saxon photographer and his photographs. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2017, ISBN 978-3-95462-904-6
Individual evidence
- ↑ Fritz Spiess in the Internet Movie Database (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spit, Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 16, 1891 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hartha |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 22, 1945 |
| Place of death | Special camp Jamlitz |