Erich Hartmann (photographer)

Erich Hartmann (July 29, 1922 in Munich – February 4, 1999 in New York City) was a German-born American photographer.

Erich Hartmann was born July 29, 1922, in Munich, Germany, the eldest child of Max and Irma (Blattner) Hartmann who lived in Passau, a small city on the Danube near the Austrian border in which they were one of five Jewish families.

Hartmann's family was middle class.

His father, a social-democrat who served during World War I and had been imprisoned by the British, was highly respected.

In 1930, only eight years old, Erich took his first photographs.

Life became increasingly difficult after the Nazi takeover in 1933, including personal, financial, business, and family restrictions and the beginning of deportations of Jews to the first so-called 'labor camp' in the village of Dachau.

The Hartmann family moved to Munich that year, in search of a more tolerant and cosmopolitan environment.

The situation only worsened, however, and the family determined that they had to leave Germany.

In August 1938, they accepted the opportunity to emigrate to the United States, having received the necessary affidavit of support from distant relatives there.

They sailed from Hamburg to New York City, staying initially in Washington Heights, Manhattan, before settling outside Albany, New York.

The only English speaker in the family, Erich Hartmann worked in a textile mill in Albany, New York, attending evening high school and later taking night courses at Siena College.

On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US entered the war, and Erich enlisted in the US Army.

Trained in Virginia and at Ohio State University, he had to wait until 1943 before serving in England, Belgium (Battle of the Bulge) and France, and with the liberating forces as a court interpreter at Nazi trials in Cologne, Germany.

At the end of the war he moved to New York City where, in 1946, he married Ruth Bains; they had two children, Nicholas (born in 1952) and Celia (born in 1956).

During these years, he worked as an assistant to portrait photographer George Feyer, and then as a freelancer.

He studied at the New School for Social Research with Charles Leirens, Berenice Abbott, and Alexey Brodovitch.

His portrait subjects over the years included architect Walter Gropius, writers Arthur Koestler and Rachel Carson, musicians Leonard Bernstein and Gidon Kremer, actor Marcel Marceau, fellow photographer Ed Feingersh, and many other literary and musical personalities.

Music played a great role in his life and work: "Music captured me before photography did," he recalled.

"In my parents' house there was not much music except for a hand-cranked gramophone on which I surreptitiously and repeatedly played a record of arias from "Carmen". This was before I could read!″

In the 1950s Hartmann first became known to the wider public for his poetic approach to science, industry and architecture in a series of photo essays for Fortune magazine, beginning with The Deep North, The Building of Saint Lawrence Seaway and Shapes of Sound.

He later did similar essays on the poetics of science and technology for French, German and American Geo and other magazines.

Throughout his life he traveled widely on assignments for the major magazines of the US, Europe and Japan and for many corporations such as AT&T, Boeing, Bowater, Citroën, Citibank, Corning Glass, DuPont, European Space Agency, Ford, IBM, Johns Hopkins University, Kimberly-Clark, Pillsbury Company, Nippon Airways, Schlumberger, TWA, and Woolworth, for all of which he used color.

In 1952 he was invited to join Magnum Photos, the international photographers’ cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger and Henri Cartier-Bresson, he served on the board of directors from 1967 to 1986, and as president in 1985–1986.

His first solo exhibition Sunday with the Bridge, a photographic study of the Brooklyn Bridge, opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 1956.

In 1962, his book and exhibition Our Daily Bread toured widely around the United States.

Many more exhibits followed over the years, in the United States, Japan, and throughout Europe.

He lectured at the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria, at the Syracuse University School of Journalism, and elsewhere, taught at workshops and seminars, and received commendations including the Photokina award (Cologne, Germany), the CRAF International Award (Italy), the Newhouse Citation in Photography (US) and numerous Art Directors Club awards.

His principal interest, in photography as in life, was the way in which people relate both to their natural surroundings and to the environments they create.

Our Daily Bread and The World of Work were continuing long-term projects.

He documented not only industry and technology – glass-making, boat-building, farming, food production, aviation, construction, space exploration, scientific research – but also the human cultural and geographical context: Shakespeare's England, James Joyce's Dublin or Thomas Mann's Venice.

His personal projects reveal a fascination with the way technology can embody beauty: the abstract patterns of ink drops in water, intimate portraits of tiny precision-manufactured components, or laser light in natural and man-made environments.

His obsession with laser light began in the 1970s, Ruth Hartmann remembers: ″He saw there a way to make light truly "write", to "photo" "graph".

He began experimenting with diffusing laser light through different kind of glass, through prisms, lenses of all kinds, through faceted doorknobs, breaking the light into pieces to make designs, to write.

He then refined his techniques so as to be able to impose a controlled image of concentrated light on landscapes, then on people.

This culminated in a major show in New York and other smaller shows.″

This concern with dehumanization led him undertake in his late years a very personal and intimate project that both honored and transcended memory.

Auschwitz, Bełżec, Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Bullenhuser Damm, Chełmno, Dachau, Emsland, Gross Rosen, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Treblinka, Vught, Westerbork ...

For more than eight weeks in 1994, Erich and Ruth Hartmann undertook a winter journey to photograph the remains of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, and places of deportation, throughout Europe.

He was determined to take only black and white photographs and to capture only what he saw, immediately when arriving, no matter whether days looked like nights.

He returned to New York with 120 rolls of film, from which he made a first edit of 300 photographs and a final selection of only 74 frames.