Robert Häusser

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Häusser (born November 8, 1924 in Stuttgart ; † August 5, 2013 in Mannheim ) was a German photographer and is considered one of the pioneers of contemporary photography.

Life

Robert Häusser grew up in Stuttgart. As a small boy, his mother gave him a camera obscura with which he took his first photographs .

During the time of National Socialism , his father changed from an initial supporter of Hitler to a bitter opponent, which is why he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1936 for " conspiracy " .

In 1938 Robert Häusser was the first fully-fledged camera to receive a Kodak Retinette and in 1940 a Rolleicord camera from the estate of a neighbor who died in the war . Now he started to take photos properly and the early pictures were taken . From 1940 to 1941 he completed his traineeship as a press photographer in Stuttgart , after which he did an apprenticeship in a craft photo company until 1942 and attended the graphic technical school in Stuttgart.

From 1942 to 1945, Häusser was a soldier and was held in American captivity until 1946 . In 1946 he married Elfriede Meyer, with whom he had a daughter.

He lived with his parents in the Mark Brandenburg from 1946 to 1952 . In addition to his work on the farm, he devoted himself increasingly to photography. From 1949 he studied with Heinrich Freytag and Walter Hege at the School of Applied Arts in Weimar .

The first exhibitions followed as early as 1950, for example at the first Photokina in Cologne . At the same time, Häusser was accepted into the Society of German Photographers (GDL), today's German Photographic Academy (DFA). There he was active as a member of the jury and the presidium.

Häusser's pictures were soon printed in West German publications and awarded prizes. The permanent contacts with the West were suspicious of those in power in the GDR . When Robert Häusser refused the offer to become a member of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR , the regime reacted with increasing reprisals. The entire family came under pressure and was under constant surveillance. The family then gave up the farm in 1952 and fled to West Germany, where Häusser built a new life.

Robert Häusser gained a foothold in Mannheim and made a name for himself with commissioned work. In 1957 he built his own photography studio there, in which he was gradually able to employ a few people. During this time, Häusser earned his living with the publication of numerous illustrated books on cities and landscapes as well as with his work for artists. At the same time, he went on commissioned trips for various industrial companies and publishers, which took him around the world as a sought-after photographer for industry and architecture.

In the 1960s, Häusser began to travel on behalf of well-known magazines, published other books and portrayed personalities from politics and culture. His increasing success left Häusser less and less room to take photos freely. Then he began to reduce commercial photography more and more and slowly reduced his business in order to concentrate entirely on artistic photography. In 1968 he decided not to do any more commissioned work and “only to take photos of what really interested me”.

Häusser was active in cultural politics all his life. In addition to his activities for the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL), Häusser was a founding member of the Association of Freelance Photo Designers (BFF) in 1969 . He was a member of the German Association of Artists (on whose board he was elected in 1987), as well as the University of Music and Performing Arts Mannheim and the Darmstadt Secession . In the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner he held the positions of managing director, president and vice-president and in these roles pushed the reorientation of this association, the self-critical examination of its role in the Nazi era and the reorganization of the German Photographic Academy (DFA).

Robert Häusser lived in Mannheim and Ibiza . He stopped taking photos when he was old, but was concerned with archiving and organizing his work.

plant

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Robert Häusser's archive contains 64,000 negatives . His artistic oeuvre consists exclusively of black and white pictures and can be divided into several phases.

Already at the age of 14 his pictures of people who were given dramatically long shadows by a low sun, taken with the retinette, are assigned to his oeuvre . Even when he was around 18 years old, Robert Häusser was already creating pictures that could be considered the highlights of what was then "newer photography".

In addition to his commissioned work, which served to earn a living, he devoted himself to free artistic photography throughout his later life. In this he developed his own image conception based on objective motifs. His motifs dealt with transience, with the transformation of nature through humans, with traces in the landscape. He worked with strong contrasts, which inevitably led to his decision for black and white photography . His works were created detached from the artistic and photographic trends of the respective time, even if in parts of his work parallels to New Objectivity , Subjective Photography or Magical Realism can often be seen. This is how Häusser set the style for post-war German photography.

According to Susan Sontag , his pictures of things and signs in an often mystical, industrial or agricultural landscape are “the result of an intensive intellectual and creative examination of the objects found in visible reality”. Häusser himself puts it: “The small, quiet things attracted me.” Häusser's visual signature consists of a clarity of forms, strong light-dark contrasts and an often symmetrical, but always clearly structured image structure. His way of photographing does not consist in arranging something or staging a preconceived image, but rather in peeling out the quintessence of the found unchanged reality through the style of the illustration, be it objects, landscapes or - relatively rarely - people. To this end, he subordinates all photographic parameters such as viewing angle, lighting, composition, image division, image detail, but also exposure, contrast, etc. so clearly that a hitherto unnoticed being appears to emerge behind the photographed objects. Häusser always makes his own prints in order to be able to influence his pictures during the development and exposure.

The expression of the early pictures seem heavy, gloomy and deserted. They are shaped by Häusser's family suffering during the Nazi dictatorship and his experience of the war years. His flight to West Germany also found expression in his pictures. His photographs were very bright for a short creative period and were almost closer to drawings than photographs ; this period from 1952 to 1954 is considered to be Häusser's “bright period”.

A constant in his work is to show the melancholy of things as well as the confrontation with death and the transience of tangible, human and personal existence. In a self-portrait, Häusser stands under a window cross in bright light above his head, his face receding in the semi-darkness in the center of the picture, with his chest in the glaring light of a cross-shaped window shadow, which stands out on him like the crosshairs of a sniper. Doomed to die, like a crucified one, he stands undeterred and consciously accepts suffering and death.

The “portrait” of a Formula I racing car wrapped in tarpaulin with the title “JR5-9-70”, taken at the 1970 German Grand Prix, is also famous : What at first looks like a somewhat stylized object photograph turns out to be eerie at second glance Proximity to death noticeable, because the designated driver Jochen Rindt succumbed to a tragic racing accident 4 weeks after being admitted. This packaged racing car, unused for all time, takes on the significance of a coffin in which the racing driver still seems to be sitting, and the succinct image is more urgent than any gravestone as a “ memento mori ”. With this title, Robert Häusser dedicated the picture to the deceased racing driver; The report on Hockenheim, which was actually commissioned, never came about because Häusser was overly fascinated by this object in terms of photography.

In later years, however, portraits were also created, mainly by artists; Some of the street scenes populated by people are also known from Häusser, but thematically should be seen as an exception. More often he is concerned with the relationship between man and landscape or the environment; really cheerful pictures are very rare with him.

Architectural photographs of high artistic value were also created at the interface between artistic and commercial photography. Outstanding are his pictures of modern church buildings, which were already on view in the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt.

In 1989, Häusser was awarded the title of professor by the state of Baden-Württemberg for his services to photography and its recognition as art, as well as for his cultural-political commitment and his artistic oeuvre. In 1995 he was the first German photographer to receive the “International Prize for Photography” ( Hasselblad Award ) from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation, the most highly endowed prize for photography, which is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Photography”.

Robert Häusser is one of the few internationally recognized post-war German photographers. His pictures were exhibited as early as the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when photography did not yet have the autonomous artistic status it had in later years. His works are in many private and public collections. So took z. In 1963, for example, the New York MoMA added three of his works to its collection.

Robert Häusser's work has been presented to the public in numerous publications and retrospective exhibitions in recent years . On his 80th birthday, his life's work was honored with his 100th solo exhibition in the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim .

Based in Mannheim for decades and deeply rooted in the city, Häusser bequeathed his entire legacy of a total of 64,000 works (negatives, prints, books, documents, etc.) from more than 60 years to the Forum Internationale Photographie of the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim during his lifetime . Aspects from Robert Häusser's entire oeuvre are presented anew every year in an exhibition presentation.

Awards

Exhibitions

  • 2004/2005: Robert Häusser - from the photographic work 1938-2004. Retrospective for the 80th birthday. International Photography Forum, Mannheim. November 9, 2004 to February 27, 2005.
  • 2009: Robert Häusser - The Moortagebuch. Photographs and notes. Geeste-Groß Hesepe, Emsland Moor Museum : August 2 to November 29, 2009.
  • 2009/2010: The Berlin Wall. Photographs and quotes. Mannheim, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen , Forum Internationale Photographie: June 7th, 2009 to December 30th, 2010.
  • 2010/2011: Put it in the word - contemporary poetry to photographs by Robert Häusser. Museum of Applied Arts Cologne : December 4, 2010 to January 30, 2011.
  • 2011: The daily bread. Photographs by Robert Häusser. Museum of Bread Culture : June 5 - August 14, 2011.
  • 2013/2014: Robert Häusser - On behalf ... Photographs from craft and industry. Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Forum Internationale Photographie: March 24, 2013 - January 12, 2014

Movies

In the meantime, three 45-minute films about Robert Häusser and his work have been made at various ARD stations .

  • 1972: Language from Light and Time , by Georg Bense ( SR )
  • 1986: Making the invisible visible , by Rudolf Werner ( SDR )
  • 2004: Robert Häusser - a life in pictures , by Kerstin Achenbach ( ZDF / 3sat )
  • 2010: Robert Häusser - Life and Work , by Rudij Bergmann, support group for the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museums

literature

  • Robert Häusser. Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-926318-62-7 . (Ribbon with a short biography and over 100 pictures that represent a representative cross-section of the work.)
  • Robert Häusser. From the photographic work 1938–2004. Braus, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-89904-137-2 . (Comprehensive monograph of the life's work)
  • Helmut Striffler architect, photographer Robert Häusser. Junius, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-88506-518-5 .
  • Robert Häusser: Put it in words. Contemporary poetry based on photographs by Robert Häusser. Edition Braus, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89904-257-3 .
  • Robert Häusser: The Berlin Wall. Photographs and quotes. Edition Braus, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-89466-305-6 .
  • Robert Häusser in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Robert Häusser: Black and White. Stories with and without photography. Wunderhorn Verlag, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-88423-433-4 (posthumously published autobiography)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Photographer Robert Häusser is dead. Morgenweb.de, August 15, 2013, accessed on March 10, 2016 .
  2. ^ Board members of the German Association of Artists since 1951 / 1987-1988. (No longer available online.) Deutscher Künstlerbund, archived from the original on December 17, 2015 ; accessed on August 17, 2015 . 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kuenstlerbund.de
  3. ^ Exhibition on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Mannheim November 2004 to February 2005. ( Memento of November 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on August 5, 2013).
  4. ↑ Robert Häusser - On behalf ... Photographs from craft and industry. ( Memento of March 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, accessed on May 22, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Häusser, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 2013
Place of death Mannheim