An unknown photographer whose work was everywhere

 

A quite an amazing book about photographer Paul Wolff and his partner Alfred Tritschler. Wolff was born in southwestern Germany in 1887 (he died in 1951) and took up photography professionally in his twenties. He met Tritschler, who had a Master of Photography degree which was required to open a photo studio and Dr Wolff & Tritschler was born. Their work was used in a whole range of publications, especially corporate work for large German companies, showing their factories and how products were made. In 1926 Wolff won a Leica in a competition and used various versions for the rest of his life, it helped being a friend of Oskar Barnack, the inventor of the small hand-held camera.

The author makes the point that Wolff produced a staggering amount of work during his career yet his name wouldn't appear on any list of the most important European photographers during the first half of the last century. Museums would have prints by Renger-Patzsch, E O Hoppe, August Sanders, Karl Blossfeld, or Andreas Feininger but until recently nothing by Wolff. Fortunately over 500,000 Leica negatives of his work have survived. 

The book methodically traces the output of this remarkable photographer with his work for company promotional material, posters, postcards, trade and consumer magazine for covers and inside reportage, ads, travel brochures and calendars. Page 131 has four spreads from a brochure for bathing suits. He contributed to books about travel, animals and photography. Reading this book intrigued me so much I bought a copy of Wolff's 1952 book My experiences in color photography.

But wait, there's more. On page 578 begins a chapter on photographer Paul Wolff of Dresden (1876-1947). With two photographers doing similar work, especially German travel photography, so the book's Paul Wolff, in 1924, added Dr. in front of his name to avoid confusion between publishers who bought work from both photographers. They are about a hundred examples of work from Dresden Wolff.

Steidl has excelled themselves with this remarkable book. There are 2980 images in the 600 pages, all with a slight drop-shadow to lift them off the page and printed with a 175 screen.  Like Manfred Harting's other titles on photobooks Wolff's work is shown as covers and spreads (and as a publication designer this format particularly interests me) so it's possible to see how publishers used the photos. Everything has comprehensive captions with reference to publisher, publication size, number of pages, print run, printer and more.

There is no separate bibliography of Wolff's work in the back pages, the whole book sets out to do that.