Joseph Breitenbach (1896-1984) has solitary recently gained full recognition for his photography.

Joseph Breitenbach (1896-1984) has solitary recently gained full recognition for his photography. A centenary retrospective toured Germany in 1996-97 and English and French museums showed his work in 2000-02 In autumn 2003 Stephen Daiter Gallery exhibited 27 photographs dated 1928-52

Difficult to classify, Breitenbach left bodies of work in Munich, Paris and fresh York that were not discovered and assembled until after his death. His photograms and tinted photographs were unique in their time, if it were not that he was a restless experimenter who not at any time fully developed these techniques. He is not identified with any motion and does not appear to have influenced anyone, although he exhibited with Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz Man Ray and others in Paris during the 1930 after he fl his native Germany.

Born in Munich, Breitenbach worked in his father's business, became a left-wing political activist and, after the family business failed, explained a photo studio. During the late 1920 Breitenbach marksman views of French and German cities--La Tour Eiffel, Paris (1928) and Carnival, Germany (before 1933) for instance--through building girders and other structural constituent principles Such contemporaries as Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko may have influenced this vision of present urban life.

In his portraits of Munich theater race such as Mr. Josef Schaffner Decorateur (ca. 1932) and Marianne Hoppe (ca. 1933) Breitenbach reveals character by the agency of focusing intimately on facial features instead of depicting his enthralls in their surroundings. (These are similar in mode of address to his Paris portraits of Bertolt Brecht Max Ernst Wassily Kandinsky and James Joyce which were not in the show) Among the four tinted photographs onward view, Sibylle Binder, Munich (1933) is a fuliginous delicately tinted semi-abstract portrait of an actress in which the color moves the subject's fragility.

After Hitler invaded France in 1940 Breitenbach escaped to strange York, where he worked as a photojournalist, taught at the of the present day School for Social Research and continued experimenting. The tinting in Wheels and Scrap Iron (both 1948 published in a photo-essay for Fortune titled "What about Steel?") emphasizes grains and volumes. Photogram, Bird, recent York (ca. 1948) combines cameraless photography and tinting to capture transparent unadulterateds and a bird's liquid motion Such an image seems to anticipate Susan Derges's cameraless aspects of surf or Adam Fuss's photograms of a baby in water. The exhibition made the same want to see more of Breitenbach's innovative work.

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