About Erich Hartmann
My father was born July 29, 1922 in Munich, Germany, the eldest
child of parents who actually lived 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 in August 1938
they gratefully accepted an opportunity to emigrate to the United
States. Dad returned to Europe during World War II as an American
solder, and then settled in New York City. In 1946 he married
Ruth Bains; I was born in 1952, and my sister Celia in 1956.
He started as an assistant to a portrait photographer and
then began working as a portraitist himself, taking pictures
of authors, musicians, and other cultural figures. He soon took
on industrial and commercial work as well, traveling throughout
the United States to document the grain harvest, the building
of the St. Lawrence Seaway, life in the upper Midwest during
winter, and many other subjects. In 1952 he was invited to join
Magnum Photos, the
photographers' cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa.
In a career that continued until literally a few days before
he died, he took hundreds of thousands of color and black-and-white
pictures. 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 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, 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. In 1985 he was elected President of Magnum Photos.
In 1993 he undertook a project very different from his usual
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 from which he and his immediate family were so fortunately
spared. A book containing those photographs and text by him and
my mother was published in 1995 as In
the Camps; versions in French, German, and Italian soon
followed. A selection of the pictures was 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.
Although much of his photography for corporate and industrial
clients was in color, he was never without a camera loaded with
black-and-white film. In the late 1990s he began make a definitive
selection from 50 years of this personal work, and just a few
months before his death he began discussions with a gallery in
Austria about developing an exhibition called Where I Was.
He died unexpectedly on February 4, 1999, but my mother decided
to continue the task of defining and preparing the pictures,
and the show opened at Galerie
Fotohof in Salzburg on June 27, 2000. A review
(in German) of the version of the exhibition presented at Leica
Gallery in New York appeared in Aufbau,
the German-Jewish newspaper published in New York City since
1934. The pictures were later published in a book of the same
title, available from Otto Müller
Verlag (ISBN 3-7013-1018-1).
More about Erich Hartmann
on the Web
His "official" biography
on the Magnum Photos site.
My remembrance
of him delivered at his memorial service in April 1999, reprinted
in Aufbau.
An affectionate tribute by Frank
Bardin. In 1950 Dad photographed his father, John Franklin
Bardin, for the cover of Bardin's book The Burning Glass
(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950).
An obituary from the Boothbay
Register, the regional newspaper for the town in Maine
where our family once had a summer house. Rachel
Carson, one of the founders of the American enviromental
movement, lived nearby; Dad's picture of her has become iconic,
even appearing on a U.S.
postage stamp.
An online
gallery of photographs from In the Camps, hosted by
Germany's Goethe-Institut.
Later in his life when he decided to travel less, Dad did
a pro bono project for a drug rehabilitation program called
Veritas Therapeutic
Community on New York's upper West Side. The resulting black-and-white pictures
are both perceptive and compassionate.
Among Dad's many industrial clients was Schlumberger, the
international energy exploration and research company. In its
1996 Annual Report, his photos accompanied "The
Expanding World of the Smart Card." His photographs
of the company's new directors for the 1998 Annual
Report were among his last corporate assignments. The credit page
for that publication includes their farewell to him: "Photographs
of new officers by Erich Hartmann/Magnum... (1922-1999): photographer,
colleague, teacher, friend. We will miss him."
In 1997, the Centro di Ricerca e Archiviazione della Fotografia
(CRAF), in Spilimbergo in northeastern Italy, awarded Dad its
International Award of Photography, and mounted the "In
the Camps" exhibition in Villa Savorgnan. CRAF's Director,
Walter Liva wrote this
tribute on Erich's death.
In October 1998, Dad lectured at the United World College
of the Adriatic in Duino, Italy. In February 2000, UWCA honored
his memory when Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, President of the Italian
Republic, officially inaugurated the Erich
Hartmann Arts Centre in the presence of my mother, Ruth Bains
Hartmann.
Here is a JPEG
file reproducing an undated article from an unidentified
Italian newspaper, reporting Dad's visit (probably in 1998) to
the United World College.
His portrait of the modern architect Walter
Gropius , for an Encyclopedia Brittanica article.
One of Dad's endearingly surreal
pictures, originally sent as my parents' holiday card.
A journalist's irreverent report on the Magnum
annual meeting in 1996.
Tina Ruisinger's Faces
of Photography includes a profile of Erich Hartmann in
words and pictures, along with 50 other giants of the medium.
As of January 2004 the book was still available from Amazon.com.
Dad's photo essay about Dublin, Ireland, inspired by James
Joyce's Ulysses, was created in the 1960s. Some of the
pictures were exhibited in Dublin itself at the Gallery
of Photography in connection with the 100th anniversary of
"Bloomsday" (June 16, 1904), and in Memphis, Tennessee
at the Robinson Gallery as part of the Memphis in May Festival.
The French-language site "photography-now" has a
listing
(which presumably will be kept updated as necessary) of Erich
Hartmann's recent exhibits and publications.
In collaboration with Magnum Photos, Slate posts a feature
called "Today's
Pictures" in which Dad's photographs occasionally appear.
