Otto Steinert

Otto Steinert is one of the most important figures in post-war European photography. He broke with the conventions of documentary photography and profoundly influenced the visual language, both theoretically and practically.
Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 1915, Steinert's interest in photography began as a teenager, but he first chose a career as a doctor, serving as a staff physician during World War II. In 1947, he began to devote himself to photography full-time. He spent the rest of his professional life experimenting with form and technique using the camera to explore photography as a means of personal expression. Steinert placed a new emphasis on the photographer's own creativity. He described how a series of creative decisions, from the choice of equipment to perspective and printing techniques, could make the subject take on a new meaning or significance.
Steinert's hallmarks are tight cropping, slow shutter speeds and multiple exposures. He often worked with photograms (where objects are placed on light-sensitive paper and developed without a darkroom) and was a master at manually manipulating his images through darkroom montage.
From 1948, Steinert taught photography at the Saarland State School of Arts and Crafts in Saarbrücken. In 1949, he founded the Fotoform group, which aimed to revive the avant-garde photography of the 1920s and the formal experiments of the "New Vision" movement and the idiom developed at the pioneering Bauhaus school. Between 1950 and 1958, Fotoform presented several important exhibitions under the title "Subjektive Fotografie".
From 1959 onwards, Steinert was a teacher and professor at the Folkwang Schule in Essen. There he also built up a renowned museum. Today, his archive is part of the photographic collection of the Museum Folkwang.
Steinert is represented in most major museum collections, including MoMA in New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The Moderna Museet collection in Stockholm includes the auction motif, and the collections of the Getty Museum and the Centre Pompidou include another version of the same motif, “Die Bäume vor Meinem Fenster I”, 1950, depicting the three trees without leaves.
Several exhibitions of Steinert's photography have been organized around the world, including at the Tate Modern in London and the Museum Folkwang, Essen.