The Absolute Realist
Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967
by Albert Renger-Patzsch
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jan 03 2023 | Archive Date Feb 15 2023
Getty Publications | Getty Research Institute
Talking about this book? Use #GettyPublications #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
A towering figure in the history of photography, Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) has come to epitomize New Objectivity, the neorealist movement in modernist literature, film, and the visual arts recognized as the signature artistic style of Germany’s Weimar Republic. Today, his images are regularly exhibited and widely considered key influences on contemporary photographers. Whether they capture geometrically intricate cacti, flooded tidal landscapes, stacks of raw materials, or imposing blast furnace towers, Renger-Patzsch’s photographs embody what his peer Hugo Sieker termed “absolute realism,” an approach predicated upon the idea that photographers have one task: to exploit the camera’s unique capacity to document with uncompromising detail.
Not only a photographer, Renger-Patzsch was also an influential and lucid writer who advocated his unique brand of uncompromising realism in almost a half century’s worth of articles, essays, lectures, brochures, and unpublished manuscripts addressing photography, technology, and modernity. Drawing on his papers at the Getty Research Institute and other archives, The Absolute Realist unites in one volume this skillful photographer’s ideas about the defining visual medium of modernity.
Advance Praise
“Daniel H. Magilow’s careful translation and thorough annotation of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s writings offer an invaluable invitation: For the very first time, we can discover one of the most influential photographers of the modern era as an eminent theorist and attentive critic. This excellent edition will undoubtedly advance our interest in a period when the art of photography became not just a subject for professionals but an affair for countless amateurs.”
—Steffen Siegel, editor of First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography
“Albert Renger-Patzsch has long been known as a giant of early twentieth-century photography. Thanks to Daniel Magilow's deft editing and translations, an English-speaking public can now learn what a savvy critic and theorist of photography he was as well.”
—Pepper Stetler, author of Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book
“Daniel H. Magilow brings both a wealth of knowledge and precision to The Absolute Realist—qualities that Albert Renger-Patzsch himself prized. In addition to his astute translations, Magilow offers a fresh and nuanced reading of the photographer’s most prominent years. He underscores the tension between consistency and breadth across almost a half century of thought in ways that make this collection of the German modernist’s writings especially relevant for readers today.”
—Matthew S. Witkovsky, Sandor Chair and Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago
“As the first complete collection of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s writings, The Absolute Realist brings one of the twentieth century’s most significant photographers into focus as a writer and theorist. Gorgeously illustrated with Renger-Patzsch’s photographs—which are by turns hauntingly beautiful, sublime, and downright funny—Daniel H. Magilow’s crisp translations and insightful commentary shed new light on Renger-Patzsch’s life and work during Germany’s most tumultuous decades.”
—Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Art History, University at Buffalo (SUNY)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781606067802 |
| PRICE | $50.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 340 |
