About Erich Hartmann

 

My father was born on July 29, 1922 in Munich, Germany, the first child of Max Hartmann and Irma Hartmann (née Blattner) who actually lived about a hundred miles away in Passau, a small city on the Danube near the Austrian border in which they were one of a handful of Jewish families. Their lives became increasingly difficult after the Nazi takeover in 1933, and they moved to Munich in search of a more tolerant and cosmopolitan environment. The situation only grew worse, however, and it became apparent that they had to leave Germany. Although my father was then only in his mid-teens, his already excellent knowledge of English made it possible for them to obtain, from distant American relations outside Albany, New York, the affidavit that allowed them to emigrate. In August, 1938, having stopped to visit relatives in Berlin for what turned out to be the last time, the family boarded a steamship in Hamburg and arrived in New York Harbor. Dad returned to Europe as an American soldier during World War II, and then worked as an interpreter in the American-administered courts in occupied Germany. After his discharge he settled in New York City, and in 1946 he married Ruth Bains; I was born in 1952, and my sister Celia in 1956.

He had begun taking photographs as a GI, and in New York he took a job as an assistant to a portrait photographer and then began working as a portraitist himself, taking pictures of authors, musicians, architects, and many other cultural figures for magazines and book publishers. He soon took on industrial and commercial work as well, traveling throughout the United States to document such essentially American subjects as the grain harvest on the Great Plains, the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and life in the upper Midwest during winter. In 1952 he was invited to join Magnum Photos, the photographers' cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa.

He went on to take over a million color and black-and-white pictures, working almost constantly until a few days before he died. His photographic essays on innumerable aspects of the world's industry, technology, commerce, and culture were published in Fortune, Life, Time, Newsweek, Business Week, The New York Times Magazine, Venture, Travel and Leisure, Paris Match, Die Zeit, GEO, Focus (Germany), Epoca, Stern, Newton (Japan), and many other periodicals. His photographs also appeared in annual reports, books, and brochures for corporate and institutional clients such as All Nippon Airways, AT&T, Boeing, Bowater, Citicorp, Corning Glass, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, DuPont, European Space Agency, Ford Motor Company, IBM, the Israel Government Tourist Corporation, The Johns Hopkins University, Kimberly Clark, Mead Corporation, Monsanto, Pillsbury, Schlumberger, Telefonica PR, TWA, Voest Alpine, and Woolworth, among numerous others. From 1985 to 1987 he served as President of Magnum Photos.

In 1993 he undertook a project very different from his previous work, and of great personal significance to him. Traveling in winter through Germany, Poland, and other parts of Europe, he documented in black and white the remains of the Nazi concentration camp system that had destroyed almost all of his relatives in Germany, and from which he and his immediate family had been spared. A book containing those photographs, along with text by him and my mother, was published in 1995 as In the Camps; versions in French (Le Silence des Camps), German (Stumme Zeugen), and Italian (Il Silenzio dei Campi) soon followed. A selection of the pictures was then assembled into an exhibition that was shown in New York and elsewhere in the U.S., and then traveled to venues in Italy, France, Austria, and England.

Much of what he photographed for corporate and industrial clients was done in color, but he always carried with him a small camera and a few rolls of black-and-white film, prepared for every visual opportunity. He also deliberately pursued a series of imaginative projects in black and white. Some of them required ingenious equipment that he devised himself: a small fish tank and medicine droppers to capture balletic images of ink drops dispersing through water; an assortment of rotating segmented disks attached in front of the camera lens, dissecting continuous motion into bundles of stroboscopic moments; a fixture that positioned discarded chandelier pendants and crystal drawer pulls so as to transfigure a laser beam, that modern epitome of rectilinearity, into mysterious calligraphic lines across darkened landscapes. Others were very simple: a quiet examination of dimension and scale using rounded beach pebbles lodged in small boxes; and haunting images taken in a warehouse full of store-window mannequins, their blank faces and herded shaven heads a metaphor for the terminal depersonalization of the camps. In the late 1990s, with an eye toward a future retrospective exhibition, he began reviewing all these results of both invention and discovery, and selecting the pictures that best represented what he had recorded for his own artistic purposes rather than for those of his many clients. That project, and his life, came to an end on February 4, 1999.

My mother continued and completed his final task, and in the Spring of 2000 a small exhibition of his personal pictures entitled “Where I Was” opened at Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg, Austria. Those pictures were also published in a book of the same name, and the show then traveled to Germany, New York, and Tokyo. Additional books and exhibitions of my father’s pictures have since been prepared under her supervision, presenting both his lesser-known black-and-white work and subjects such as classical music and musicians (one of Dad's lifelong passions), James Joyce's Dublin, as well as his often breathtaking abstract color studies.


Erich Hartmann on the Web

A few links relevant to my father's life and work are provided on the left side of this page, but the volume of information on the Internet, and the rate at which both its content and its technology are changing, make it difficult to maintain a complete inventory of references.

As the Web has grown, however, the tools for retrieving information from it have also become more capable and more refined. The best way to find out more about him is therefore to use those tools effectively. A minor complicating factor is the existence of another Erich Hartmann, who flew fighter aircraft for the German air force during the second World War. Any search on Google or Wikipedia aimed at further information about my father should therefore incorporate the term "magnum" or "photographer" in order to maximize the number of relevant results.

In addition to the aspects of his life and work presented above, here are a few more topics worth exploring:

Soon after his death, obituaries appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to Aufbau (long the voice of the emigré German Jewish community in New York and beyond, now no longer published) and the Boothbay Register (the weekly newspaper of Boothbay Harbor, the town in Maine where our family often spent summer vacations).

Rachel Carson, one of the founders of the American environmental movement, lived nearby in Maine; Dad's picture of her has become iconic, even appearing on a U.S. postage stamp.

Another of the cultural portraits that Dad made early in his career was of the author John Franklin Bardin, for the cover of his book The Burning Glass (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950). Bardin's son Frank wrote an affectionate tribute that may still be accessible.

Later in his life when he decided to travel less, Dad did a pro bono project, in black and white, for a drug rehabilitation program called Veritas Therapeutic Community on New York's upper West Side.

Reviews of In the Camps and its associated exhibitions, in various languages, can still be found.

A few years before he died, Dad began a project in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy, and quickly established relationships with a number of photographic and academic institutions in that area. These included the Centro di Ricerca e Archiviazione della Fotografia (CRAF) in Spilimbergo, which bestowed on him its International Award of Photography in 1997; and the United World College of the Adriatic in Duino, where he held lectures and colloquia for students in October 1998 and which honored his memory in February 2000 when Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, President of the Italian Republic, officially inaugurated the Erich Hartmann Arts Centre at the College.