Walter E. Lautenbacher
Walter Ernst Hans Werner Lautenbacher (born February 23, 1920 in Munich ; † August 10, 2000 in Leonberg ) was one of the most important and influential photo designers in Germany of the 20th century and one of the leading fashion photographers of his time. He is the founder of the BFF professional association of free photographers and film designers and is considered the founder of the profession of photo designer.
Life
childhood and education
Walter E. Lautenbacher, born in Munich in 1920, studied there from 1947 to 1949 at the Bavarian State College for Photography (most recently: State Academy for Photo Design, Munich ). This school was founded in 1900 by his biological father G. H. Emmerich as a teaching and research institute for photography , the first professor of photography in Bavaria at the time.
Work as a photo designer
After completing his studies, Lautenbacher found a job at Foto Barth in Fellbach near Stuttgart , where he worked as the head of their studios for advertising photography .
In 1954 Lautenbacher set up his first studio for fashion photography in Stuttgart's Marienstraße. In the following years he developed into one of the leading fashion photographers of his time.
From 1959 he worked with the fashion editors of the magazines Constanze and Petra in Hamburg, with whom he a. a. also photographed Parisian fashion. Over 250 multi-page fashion reports were created for these magazines.
With the editorial offices of La Donna and Annabelle in Italy, Lautenbacher photographed the latest collections for prêt-à-porter in Milan and Florence . For Annabelle in Switzerland, for the magazines girlfriend , new fashion and for you , he took many fashion travel. At the same time, he worked for the press and advertising departments of major branded companies such as Bleyle , Triumph , Egeria , Comtesse , Hanro Swiss , Bogner , Ergee and Schiesser , to name just the most important.
Since 1954, two dozen assistants have been practicing at Lautenbacher. The majority of them have become successful colleagues. Lautenbacher has also promoted many photo models and made them known to the public, u. a. Ina Balke , Juliane Biallas, Rita Jaeger , Sylvia Dakis, Beate Schulz, Margie Schmitz (later Schmitz- Jürgens ), Mirja Larsson (later Sachs ), Astrid Schiller, Gloria ter Braake, Gabrielle von Canal, Britta Bauer, Evelyn Kühn u. v. a. All of them appeared on his covers and in the series of his fashion journals.
In the Federal Republic of Germany it was always customary to keep all the tricks and whistles of lighting and design as "secret" as possible. Lautenbacher had resisted early on. He always wanted to enliven the competition by openly presenting his recording techniques. As early as the 1950s, he was the first to show interested colleagues his newly furnished studio with fluorescent tubes that replaced the hot headlights at the time. Later he got the first colored papers for the backgrounds from America, found out about the latest electronic flashes on several trips to New York and passed on his knowledge. In 1963, at the Photokina , he publicly showed the method of the "fat disk" that he had introduced. H. a self-made, variable soft focus for fashion and advertising photography .
Foundation of the BFF and the profession of photo designer
In 1967 Lautenbacher and his colleagues Franz Lazi and Ludwig Windstosser organized the first exhibition of its kind called Commercial Photography in Stuttgart in the Wilhelmspalais. The special thing about the exhibition was that for the first time commercial photography, e.g. B. Advertising and fashion photography was represented as art. Up to now this was only reserved for photography that was created "for its own sake", that is, without a commercial commission.
Inspired by the success and the great response to the exhibition, decided Lautenbacher, the Financial Court to erstreiten noted that commercial photographers as artists can be recognized. Lautenbacher lost the legal dispute in the first instance, but sued again, so that the case was decided in the second instance by the Federal Fiscal Court. The Federal Fiscal Court followed Lautenbacher's complaint, so that he won the appeal. This resulted in the tax law means that not necessarily all commercial photographer than in the skilled trades registered artisans working to be had and thus the business tax documents. If a certain artistic element can be shown to be inherent in their work, they can now work as artists and thus as freelancers who are exempt from trade tax.
Driven by this explosive success in terms of tax policy for the professional group of commercial photographers, Lautenbacher decided to found a professional association for professional photographers in order to better represent their interests in the future. In addition, an institution was required that could assess which work met the artistic requirements in order to actually be awarded the status of artist - and thus freelancer. In 1969, together with two friends Lazi and Winstosser and six other colleagues, the Association of Freelance Photographers (BFF) was founded. This association sees itself as the official professional association of commercial photographers with artistic demands at the highest level. Accession requires the positive judgment of a multi-member, high-caliber jury. The aim of this is, on the one hand, to secure the association's elitist aspirations and, on the other hand, to ensure that admission to the BFF is also sufficient for the tax offices as proof of the necessary “artistic standards” to accept them as freelancers.
In order to underpin the artistic claim of the new profession, Lautenbacher popularized the term photo designer a little later . This designation quickly found acceptance, so that the BFF was renamed the Bund Freischaffender Foto-Designer . Nowadays, photo designer is an official professional title and the BFF has grown into a widely recognized professional organization.
Lautenbacher was elected board spokesman for the BFF from 1969 to 1985. In 1985 he decided not to run again for the office of board spokesman. In the same year he was made an honorary director.
With his endeavor to have high-quality commercial commissioned photography recognized as an art, Lautenbacher to a certain extent continued the work of his father Georg Heinrich Emmerich . He was regarded as a hot advocate of pictorialism , a style that had its heyday from the end of the 19th century to the First World War and which basically wanted to prove that photography can be a fully-fledged artistic means of expression and not just a technique for taking pictures of motifs. The teaching and research institute for photography , founded by Emmerich in 1900, also advocated this style for a long time.
further activities
Lautenbacher was a board member of the German Design Association and a specialist jury member in the Association of Visual Artists
Private
In 1972/74 Lautenbacher fulfilled a lifelong dream and built a studio house in Leonberg on the Engelberg . The special thing about this three-storey building was the interweaving of living and working through the integration of an automatically darkened daylight studio and a large development laboratory. The property was designed by the architect Harry GH Lie of the renowned architectural office Bächer -Lie.
Lautenbacher took photos in the service of fashion on over 220 trips abroad, most of which he organized himself . Many good friendships remained with him from these trips. a. with Eileen and Jerry Ford, owners of the world's largest modeling agency Ford Models in New York at the time .
All of the experience he had gained while working for the fashion editorial team was incorporated into his tasks for the industry and vice versa. This profound, tried and tested knowledge benefited his students, whom he taught in his seminar studio for fashion photography from 1981 to 1991.
Lautenbacher married twice. Until recently he was married to Juliane Biallas, who after her career as a photo model became a successful photographer herself and now lives and works in Athens . Lautenbacher had four sons from the two marriages.
Works
The Walter E. Lautenbacher archive contains more than 7,000 photos. Some of his pictures can be seen as vintage prints in the Museum for Art and Cultural History Dortmund and in the WANING and SCHUPMANN collections.
Publications
- 1994 Staged fashion photography 1953–1983 and how it was created. A chronology. , ISBN 3-89322-677-X , awarded the Kodak Photo Book Prize '94
- 1997 golden years , perpetual wall calendar with 12 photos
- 2000 Mode, Models and their photographer , ISBN 3-933989-06-X , Lautenbacher tells in the form of 25 short stories about experiences during some of his fashion photo expeditions in the years 1958–1975
Prizes, awards and honors
- 1949 First place in the competition of the Bavarian State Institute for Photography with the photo: Death of the candle
- 1967 Golden plaque for outstanding achievement , photo exhibition European photographers '67 of the VDAV (today DVF ) in Berlin
- 1976 Bronze Lens, Nikon Photo Contest International 1976 , Japan
- 1985 Appointment to the honorary board of the BFF
- 1989 George Eastman Gold Medal for special services to photography
- 1994 Kodak Photo Book Prize '94 for the book Staged Fashion Photography 1953–1983 and How It Was Created. A chronology.
- 1994 The BFF publishes a Cinderella stamp (see illustration) to mark the 25th anniversary of the professional association. The stamp shows the likeness of Walter E. Lautenbacher, Franz Lazi and Ludwig Windstosser, who formed the founding board in 1969
- 1995 Bronze in the Stillife category , Kodak Panther Contest
See also
literature
- Rita Jaeger: Fräuleinwunder, top model, agency manager - a life in shine . hansanord Verlag, Feldafing 2008, ISBN 978-3-940873-00-2
- Photo models - purr, purr . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1974, p. 97 ( online ).
In the media
- 1991 Documentary film Stuttgart - Pictures of a lovable city : guest appearance
- February 23, 2000 Article: Stuttgarter Zeitung - With a sense of chic and a clear interest
- February 23, 2000 Article: Stuttgarter Nachrichten - Fashion on beautiful women staged
- October 1, 2000 TV report: SWR Kultur Café - A life for fashion - portrait of the Stuttgart photographer Walter E. Lautenbacher
Web links
- Literature by and about Walter E. Lautenbacher in the catalog of the German National Library
- Association of freelance photo designers
- Schupmann Collection - Photos by Walter E. Lautenbacher
- Walter E. Lautenbacher in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Pforzheim Gallery presents the "BFF Honorary Members Gallery"
Individual evidence
- ^ Johannes Christoph Moderegger: Modefotografie in Deutschland 1929–1955 . 2000, pp. 107, 130.
- ↑ Rita Jaeger: Fräuleinwunder, top model, agency manager - a glossy life . hansanord Verlag, Feldafing 2008, ISBN 978-3-940873-00-2
- ↑ Walter E. Lautenbacher: Review . In: Zeit Blick - 30 years of photography in Germany, 30 years of the BFF Association of Freelance Photo Designers . Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 1999, pp. 15-17
- ↑ Walter E. Lautenbacher - Moments of Seeing . In: Zoom - magazine for photo and film , 12/1979, p. 58.
- ↑ Portrait of Harry GH Lie. ( Memento of the original from February 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) 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. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lautenbacher, Walter E. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lautenbacher, Walter Ernst Hans Werner (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 23, 1920 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Munich , Germany |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 10, 2000 |
| Place of death | Leonberg , Baden-Württemberg , Germany |