Albert Renger-Patzsch

[1] After military service in the First World War he studied chemistry at the Königlich-Sächsisches Polytechnikum in Dresden.

In the early 1920s he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer and, in 1925, publishing a book, Das Chorgestühl von Kappenberg (The Choir Stalls of Cappenberg).

This, his best-known book, is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations.

[2] In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style, his work exemplifies the esthetic of the New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic.

Like Edward Weston and Berenice Abbott in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.