A Photographer’s Search for Identity

How can an artist capture the experience of searching for belonging? How do they visualize the anxiety of being uprooted from a familiar place, the intense desire to make sense of unknown surroundings, or the disorienting feeling of being a stranger in a strange land?

In 1942, the German-born photographer Josef Breitenbach (1896–1984) created a photocollage that confronted these overwhelming questions. Entitled We New Yorkers, the composition depicts a human circulatory system stretching across a cityscape. Arteries and veins are suspended amid the tiny, illuminated windows of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, coalescing into a disembodied form that floats in mid-air. Breitenbach made this work soon after arriving in New York, as a refugee fleeing Nazi-occupied France—where he had been imprisoned in a series of internment camps, beginning in 1939, and escaped via the port city of Marseille.

This was not the first time that Breitenbach had experienced displacement in the face of fascist hostilities, coupled with discrimination against his Jewish heritage. He had left his hometown of Munich for Paris in 1933, amid increasing political turmoil and the suspension of civil liberties. The central figure in We New Yorkers, lost in the night, reflects both the alienation and desire for interpersonal connection that Breitenbach would have felt as a refugee. The plural “we” of its title evokes a community of recent immigrants and locals alike, pictured as the lifeblood of “the city that never sleeps.”

I thus find it fitting that the Getty Museum, as a cultural institution in a city where approximately one-third of the population is foreign born, has endeavored to acquire a significant number of works by Breitenbach. Since 2017, 32 of his photographs have entered the Museum’s collection through a series of donations from Peter C. Jones, president of the Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Foundation and executor of Breitenbach’s estate. Beyond his own career as a photographer, Jones has championed Breitenbach’s legacy throughout his life, establishing an archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, as well as mounting dozens of exhibitions dedicated to Breitenbach. Beginning this year, an additional 53 works by Breitenbach are set to join Getty’s collection in a major multi-year acquisition, through both purchase and donation, establishing the Museum as among the most significant public repositories of his photographs.

Breitenbach’s early works

The Getty Museum’s Breitenbach holdings offer a compelling survey of his revolutionary, inventive, and visionary career. The earliest prints date to the late 1920s, in the years when Breitenbach began to explore photography as a profession. He had initially pursued political activism after studying philosophy and art history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, supporting the left-wing Social Democratic Party. In 1919, soon after one of the party’s leaders was assassinated by a far-right nationalist, Breitenbach departed politics to join his family’s wine business. In these subsequent years, as he traveled across Europe to support the firm, Breitenbach began to teach himself photography.

One of the photographs that is being donated to the Museum dates from 1928 and depicts an aerial view of Paris and the Seine River, which Breitenbach shot through the wrought-iron frame of the Eiffel Tower. The cables and beams that stretch across the photograph seem to invite two coexisting approaches to interpreting the image. One approach focuses on ideas of fragmentation and separation, as the irregular grid-like structure impedes the view of the city and breaks its visual unity into dozens of small pieces. Another approach, however, could interpret the photograph as tracing new lines of connection throughout the unfamiliar city of Paris, where Breitenbach would come to live in the 1930s.

A career of experimentation

Approximately half of the works in the new acquisition are gelatin silver prints, the most common photographic process of the 20th century due to its relative ease of use and widely available materials. The other half, however, present exciting technical questions for both curators and conservators of photography at the Getty Museum. Throughout his career, Breitenbach experimented extensively with alternative and unconventional photographic processes. Across many of the works, Breitenbach directly intervened in the creation of the images, applying bleach, color, and chemical mixtures by hand to the prints.

Breitenbach also engaged with techniques of photography that were popularized by his Surrealist contemporaries, including solarization and photograms. Solarization involves briefly exposing a photograph to a light source while the image is still being developed, resulting in reversed tones and dark outlines. The photogram is a camera-less process in which objects are placed onto light-sensitive paper and subsequently exposed. Both solarization and the photogram process strongly resonated with the principles of Surrealist photography, which promoted the distortion of reality and the defamiliarization of everyday imagery. The disorienting strategies of manipulated photography arguably reflect the experiences of migration in Breitenbach’s life, punctuated by a series of displacements and uncertainties.

Documenting a changing world

At the age of 45, Breitenbach settled in the United States, where he would become a citizen a few years after arriving in the country as a refugee. He worked as a photographer for prominent publications, including Fortune and Time, and served as a teacher at Black Mountain College, the Cooper Union, and the New School for Social Research. Breitenbach also took on documentary assignments for the United Nations and the United Nations Children’s Fund, which led him to travel to Korea and Japan.

In a 1953 photograph, Breitenbach captured the Korean port city of Busan after a devastating fire, where emergency workers and civilians walk amid rubble and ruins. The work bears witness to immense destruction, yet—in photographing bustling crowds rather than deserted streets—it also attests to the hope of rebuilding after tragedy. Taken after he had witnessed the horrors of war and anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, Breitenbach’s project feels even more significant.

Through close collaboration between the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs, the estate of Josef Breitenbach represented by Peter Jones, and the Breitenbach Foundation, this remarkable body of work has found a fitting home in Los Angeles. I am thrilled for scholars, curators, conservators, and the interested public alike to be able to see the works in our online database, as well as in the Department of Photographs Study Room. Through the acquisition of works that represent the thematic diversity of his career, his innovative technical processes, and the continuing relevance of his migratory experience, Breitenbach’s significance in the history of photography is now further affirmed in the Getty Museum collection.