First Translated Volume of Photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Writings
This edition compiles the works of the artist that pioneered the New Objectivity Movement
The Absolute Realist
Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967Authors
Albert Renger-Patzsch, Daniel H. Magilow
Body Content
The work of the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) is widely regarded as a defining expression of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the neorealist movement in modernist literature, film, and the visual arts that flourished in Weimar Germany.
Renger-Patzsch’s photographs embody what his peer Hugo Sieker termed “absolute realism,” an approach predicated on the idea that photographers have one task: to exploit the camera’s unique capacity to document with uncompromising detail. Today, Renger-Patzsch’s beloved images are widely recognized and considered key influences on contemporary photographers.
In addition to his photographic work, Albert Renger-Patzsch was also an influential writer and theorist. The Absolute Realist: Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967 (Getty Research Institute, $50) makes a majority of his written oeuvre available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. This volume collects almost a half century’s worth of articles, essays, lectures, and unpublished manuscripts wherein Renger-Patzsch explicates his ideas about photography, technology, modernity, and aesthetics. Drawing on materials at the Getty Research Institute and other archives, The Absolute Realist unites in one volume this skillful photographer’s ideas about the defining visual medium of modernity.
Endorsements
“Albert Renger-Patzsch has long been known as a giant of early twentieth-century photography. Thanks to Daniel Magilow's deft editing and translations, an English-speaking public can now learn what a savvy critic and theorist of photography he was as well.”
— Pepper Stetler, author of Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book
“As the first complete collection of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s writings, The Absolute Realist brings one of the 20th-century’s most significant photographers into focus as a writer and theorist. Gorgeously illustrated with Renger-Patzsch’s photographs—which are by turns hauntingly beautiful, sublime, and downright funny—Daniel H. Magilow’s crisp translations and insightful commentary shed new light on Renger-Patzsch’s life and work during Germany’s most tumultuous decades.”
— Elizabeth Otto, professor of Art History, University at Buffalo (SUNY)
The Absolute Realist
Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967$50/£40
