Gottfried Jäger

Gottfried Jäger, son of photographer Ernst Jäger (1913-1998), learned the craft of photography in the years 1954 to 1958 with the master photographer Siegfried Baumann in Bielefeld, receiving his apprenticeship qualification in 1957.

Gottfried Jäger (born 13 May 1937 in Magdeburg) is a German photographer, photo-theorist and former university teacher.

There he discovered a work by the early pioneer of computer art, Herbert W. Franke's 1957 Kunst und Konstruktion. Its Subtitle, Physik und Mathematik als fotografisches Experiment (Physics and Mathematics as a Photographic Experiment) became Jäger's credo, an approach that he maintained throughout his career.

He then studied technical photography at the Staatliche Höhere Fachschule für Photographie in Cologne, graduating in 1960 from the master craftsman exam.

In 1960, Jäger accepted a position as a technical teacher of photography at the Werkkunstschule Bielefeld and established the medium as a basic discipline there.

From the beginning of his teaching at the Werkkunstschule Bielefeld Jäger created experimental photographic works, such as the Themes and Variations from 1960 to 1965.

In each case a single image with different photographic design parameters is serially, controlled and varied step by step.

The sometimes extensive series of images ultimately lead to photo compositions in the sense of Concrete Art, whose works dispensed with representation in favour of the free image as invention.

One of Jäger's inspirations was computer scientist Karl Steinbuch's 1961 book Automat und Mensch, an early discussion of artificial intelligence which proposed that a technical apparatus, a camera or a computer, were capable of achieving intellectual results and aesthetic products.

The text was brought to his attention in the mid-60s by Hein Gravenhorst, a friend and fellow artist in generative photography, whom he had met through Manfred Kage.

Gravenhorst and Kage were together making their own "polychromatic variations."

An example of this are 21 light graphics that Jäger created in 1964 as figurative equivalents to the text "novel" of the German writer Helmut Heißenbüttel.

In 1965 Jäger was invited to show his "Lichtgrafiken" (light graphics) at the group show Fotografie '65 in Bruges, an exhibition of rarely experimental and often abstract photography that was conceptually opposite to that organized by Karl Pawek, also then showing in Bruges; the documentary Weltausstellung der Photographie: Was ist der Mensch ('World Exhibition of Photography: What is Man').

The title, which was also approved by Franke, draws on the idea of generative aesthetics (1965) of the German philosopher Max Bense promulgated in the last chapter of his Aesthetica titled 'Projekte generativer Ästhetik';

"Generative aesthetics is an aesthetic by creation. It allows a methodical creation of aesthetic states by dissecting the creation into a finite number of specifiable and describable single steps."

Thus works of Generative Photography are a rational, apparatus-driven art confluent with the emerging computer age that follow a programmed design that applies mathematical and numerical parameters to artistic projects, and which equally entails development of 'concrete' artistic approaches.

A favourable reception of the exhibition in the press was repeated by Otto Steinert during a meeting in the exhibition space of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (German Society for Photography).

Follow-up exhibitions around this topic took place at Galerie Spektrum in Hanover, in Antwerp, and elsewhere.

Jäger defined the Generative Photography process as one of "finding a new world inside the camera and trying to bring it out with a methodical, analytical system."

Jäger elaborates; "[my] image is the concretion of the technique from which it arises, [...] it is technique that has become art. The technique has become art. The technique is art."

An expression of this is the series of works by Gottfried Jäger from the years 1967 to 1973: about 200 black-and-white and coloured light graphics on the basis of a point of light, which by means of a multiple-pinhole camera that he invented to generate geometrically determined structures.

On the occasion of his retirement, the institution praised Jäger's decisive contribution to photography being "given equal status with the arts of painting and sculpture. As early as 1968, he defined the claim of photography as an art form with the term 'Generative Photography', which stands for a systematic-constructive direction in artistic photography."

In 1968, Gottfried Jäger introduced the term Generative Photography as means of constructing photography on a systematic-constructive basis in the title of an exhibition of the Bielefelder Kunsthaus.

Apart from his own, works by Kilian Breier, Pierre Cordier and Hein Gravenhorst were also included.

In his camera photographs of natural and technical objects from 1971 to 1991, Jäger consistently pursues the serial principle of logical sequences.

In a series titled Arndt Street (1971), he used the predetermined system of photographing only corners in two-point perspective, which he described simply as, "A photographic documentation of the development of a street depicted through examples of corner buildings."

In 1972, this led to the founding of Photo/Film Design as a specialisation at the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld, with contemporary photography and media studies.

In the same year, Jäger was appointed Professor of Photography and Film at the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld in the subject areas Artistic Foundations of Photography, Photography and Generative Image Systems.

In his group of luminogram works Colour Systems of the early 1980s, photographic paper no longer appears as a picture carrier but as an object of the artistic process.

This resulted in photo objects, photo installations and installations in museums and galleries.

They follow not so much a programmed procedure in the sense of generative photography as spontaneous inspiration in dealing with the peculiarities of the photographic material, such as its imaging properties, its peculiar surfaces and its distinct plastic qualities.

For their titles, photography terms like Graukeil ('Greyscale 1983), Lichteinfall ('Incident Light', 1985), "Fotoecken" (Photo-corners, 1985) or "Bild" (View, 2000) are used.

In 1984 he founded the research focus (FSP) Photography and Media with the annual Bielefeld photo symposia.

Incidentally, it was not until 1984 that photographs had become legally works of visual art according to German copyright law.

In 1992 he received the George Eastman Medal of Kodak AG Germany; 1996 the David Octavius Hill Medal of the German Photographic Academy (DFA).

Jäger was for eight years Dean of the Faculty of Design and from 1993 to 1997 Vice President for research and development tasks of the FH Bielefeld.

From 1998 to 2002, Jäger was visiting professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Melbourne, returning in 2009 to join in a symposium About Photography II with David Martin, Salvatore Panatteri, Emidio Puglielli and Patricia Todarello, 12 September – 4 October.

In 2002 he retired from Bielefeld and was given the emeritus status.

Since 2008 he is a member of the University Council of FH Bielefeld; he is a member, honorary member and has been the chairman of many photographic associations for many years (DFA, DGPh, BFF, FFA).

In 2011, Jäger defended his PhD dissertation on the photographic work of Carl Strüwe in a thesis Photomicrography as Obsession: The Photographic Work of Carl Strüwe (1898-1988) at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature of the University of Bielefeld.