Werner Rohde (photographer)

Werner ("Tüt") Rohde (born May 16, 1906 in Bremen ; † January 15, 1990 in Worpswede ), although trained as a painter and only worked as a glass painter in the second half of his life, he was primarily important as a photographer.

Life

He was born in 1906 as the son of Georg Karl Rohde , who ran an important glass painting workshop in Bremen . After graduating from high school in 1925, he attended the Burg Giebichenstein School of Applied Arts in Halle until 1927 , especially the painting class of Prof. Erwin Hahs , who had a strong influence on Rohde. Some poster designs in the New Objectivity style date from this period . He took photography courses with Hans Finsler . Unsure about his skills as an artist and urged by his father to devote himself more to handicrafts in order to be able to take over the business later, he returns to the Bremen workshop and begins an apprenticeship as a glass painter. At the same time, he devotes himself intensively to photography and experiments with his father's plate camera. From June to November 1929 he lived in Paris, where he met the Berlin photographer Marianne Breslauer and the painter Paul Citroen . In the same year, his photographic works were exhibited for the first time in the Film and Photo exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart. At the 5th Triennale in Milan in 1933 he received a gold medal. But an exhibition in 1935 in the Graphisches Kabinett of Peter Vogt in Bremen, which was already hostile to the local National Socialists , was his last public presentation before the Second World War. He only got a few orders, including from the Focke Museum , and his father's workshop also lost its importance. In 1937 Werner Rohde married his long-time girlfriend Renata Bracksiek ("Nana"), who ran a fashion salon in Bremen. After the war he did not take up his photographic work again, but instead devoted himself to glass painting and reverse glass painting in Worpswede .

plant

Even the early recordings of Rohde from his time in Halle show an unusual desire to experiment. Photo montage , double exposures , extreme top and bottom views, deliberate blurring are his formal stylistic devices. Many of his recordings have something playful and experimental about them, as if they were finger exercises on the way to free painting. In Paris he still focused on urban situations, but in the 1930s he devoted himself almost exclusively to two topics: In addition to a few arranged factual photos with sophisticated lighting and seemingly artificial motifs, e.g. B. Dolls, the individual figure in particular determines his rather narrow work for a photographer. Surreally stylized and alienated self-portraits stand next to effectively composed fashion photos.

Today his work is concentrated in a few museums and collections, especially the FC Gundlach collection .

The rough glass window with motifs from shipping is in the stairwell of the Werderstrasse 73 campus of the Bremen University of Applied Sciences , the former University of Nautical Sciences .

literature

• Ivo Kranzfelder:  Rohde, Werner. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 764 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Werner Rohde. Photographs 1925–37 . Exhibition catalog Museum Folkwang Essen, 1992.