Dr. Paul Wolff & Alfred Tritschler. The Printed Images 1906 - 2019

Description

This book presents the photo publications of Dr. Paul Wolff and Alfred Tritschler, revealing both their extensive artistic skills and business acumen. Wolff and Tritschler's versatile approach encompassed industrial reportages, genre pictures, news coverage, advertising campaigns and even films. In this volume, their more than 1,000 known published works and many magazine contributions are gathered and illustrated in color for the first time. Texts drawing on extensive primary sources explore Wolff and Tritschler's most important creations and reconstruct the history of their company. We see just how markedly the contexts for the production and consumption of photography changed between the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, and how Wolff and Tritschler exemplify the pivotal role which outstanding individuals played within this history. Their journalistic activities developed within the larger expansion of photographic illustration; their success was closely linked to the advancement of media reception and its use in political policies. Wolff and Tritschler's photo publications take on a further, political meaning-also in terms of National Socialist ideology-in the context of their concrete usage. This book's focus on their entire oeuvre, particularly the little seen early and late output, makes it the most comprehensive evaluation of Wolff and Tritschler's multifaceted work to date. Not what is seen but how it's seen. Dr. Paul Wolff

The medical doctor Paul Wolff (1887-1951) began his photographic career in Frankfurt am Main during the Weimar Republic. In time he became one of the most important representatives of the small-format Leica camera, whose functions he conveyed to the amateur in his many iconic photographic manuals. Together with his business partner Alfred Tritschler (1905-70) Wolff established one of the largest photo studios in Germany; through the wide dissemination of their pictures they left a lasting impact on the history of the German photobook. Manfred Heiting has been a collector, curator, designer and editor of photography and photo publications since the 1970s. Books edited and designed by Heiting at Steidl include Autopsie, German-language Photobooks, 1918-1945 (2012 and 2014, together with Roland Jaeger), The Soviet Photobook, 1920-1941 (2015), The Japanese Photobook, 1912-1990 (2017) and Czech and Slovak Photo Publications, 1918-1989 (2018). He is also planning The Dutch Photobook, 1918-1990. Born in 1987, Kristina Lemke studied art history and German literature in Marburg and Mainz. Her dissertation explores the continuities and tendencies in Paul Wolff's work. Lemke works as a curator and researcher in the photographic department of the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, and has contributed to the exhibitions Lichtbilder (2014), Geschlechterkampf (2017) and Lotte Laserstein (2018).