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NEW VISION PHOTOGRAPHY
 GRÄFF,
WERNER.
Es kommt der neue Fotograf [Here Comes the New Photographer!]
FIRST EDITION IN RARE DUST JACKET of one of the
cornerstones of New Vision Photography, illustrated with 148 black and
white photographs.
Gräff’s Es kommt der neue Fotograph was published (along with
Roh and Tschichold’s Foto-Auge) around the famous Stuttgart
“Film und Foto” exhibition of 1929, generally considered the greatest
photography exhibition ever held: “not since the great international
exhibitions of the 1850s and 1860s had there been such a broad display
of the photographic arts, intended not just to show photography but to
examine its place in society.
“Importantly, the exhibition attracted leading modernist photographers
not just from Europe but from the United States (Edward Weston, for
instance) and Russia (El Lissitsky and Rodchenko). It included amateur
work, commercial and utilitarian photography, and provided an almost
indispensible survey of the New Vision in photography.” Both Es
kommt der neue Fotograph and Foto-Auge “adopt similar
picture-essay formats to run through the various genres and stylistic
features on New Vision photography. Werner Gräff’s volume, however, has
as much of a practical as a theoretical slant. It can be considered as a
‘how-to’ compendium of the new photography, and is divided into
sections, each several pages long, showing either formal strategies like
tilting the frame or repeating similar elements, close-ups and so on, or
genres such as photograms, montage, advertising and magazine
photography” (The Photobook).
In addition to the work of Gräff, Es kommt der neue Fotograph
features reproductions of photographs by other leading photographers
including Willi Baumeister, Herbert Bayer, Andreas Feininger, Siegfried
Giedion, John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Albert Renger-Patzsch,
Hans Richter and others.
Berlin: Hermann Reckendorf, 1929. Octavo (255x190mm) original
blue-stamped orange cloth, photo-pictorial dust jacket. Minor soiling
and edgewear to dust jacket. RARE. $8000.
   
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