Louis Koch

Louis Koch (* 1843 in Celle ; † December 18, 1900 in Bremen ) was a photographer in Bremen, whose importance is based on his unusually productive documentation of the topography of Bremen .

biography

Koch1843 came to Bremen in 1865 and opened a photo studio at Auf der Brake 20 . Many small-format studio portraits of him have survived , but his photographic qualities were more in the field of object photography in urban settings.

Reportage-like recordings of the great flooding of 1881/82, which were sold as picture cards in cabinet format, are among his earliest datable works. Since the 1880s, numerous photos have been taken depicting architecture , interiors, ships and technical systems. He had secured monopoly rights for the major event of the North West German Trade and Industry Exhibition in Bremen in 1890 and exploited them by selling, in some cases, large-format photo series. For the “Art History Commission” of the Bremen Senate, Koch supplied numerous photos of Bremen buildings from around 1895, often those that were taken for documentation purposes shortly before they were demolished. A considerable number of his photographs are colored, at a time when photographers still had to produce the necessary materials themselves.

Since the middle of the decade he has also devoted himself to the publication of postcards . However, his publishing house is not identical to that of Louis Koch in Halberstadt , who published chromolithographic picture postcards and there until the Second World War under the name Graph. Art Institute Louis Koch performed.

After the founder's death in 1900, his son Georg Ludwig Koch (1866–1948) took over the Bremen studios, and in 1891 the Vor dem Steintor 86 branch was added.

Parts of the photographic estate were purchased by the Bremen state in 1920 and have been kept in the Focke Museum ever since .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to Koch, Halberstadt, founded in Halberstadt in 1869, initially a manufacturer of lithographic picture postcards, since around 1895 also collotype prints. In the 1930s also copper gravure prints (specimens in the German Historical Museum).
2. ↑ Bremen State Archives, 3-K.11.c. No. 1 (January 31, 1920)

literature

• Harald Goergens and Alfred Löhr: Pictures for everyone. Bremen Photography in the 19th Century, Bremen 1985, pp. 14, 43, 60, 111.
• Kerstin Bartels u. a .: The glass negative collection of the Bremen photographers Louis and Georg Ludwig Koch in the Bremen Fockemuseum . In: Bulletin of the Museum Association for Lower Saxony and Bremen e. V., 2012, ISSN  0931-4857