Fotoform was an avant-garde photography group founded in 1949 by six young German photographers, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Peter Keetman, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstoßer.
After WW2, the photographers of the 1920s and 1930s were inactive or at the end of their careers but for a few, including Carl Strüwe, Heinz Hajek- Halke, Martha Hoepffner, Herbert List, and Adolf Lazi who organised the first comprehensive post-war exhibit, Die Photographie 1948,[1][2] held in a still partially destroyed public building in Stuttgart.
Peter Keetman, Ludwig Windstosser, Wolfgang Reisewitz and Siegfried Lauterwasser had exhibited in the show, and in 1949 were joined by Toni Schneiders and Otto Steinert and together they established the fotoform group.
[3] Otto Steinert asserted that “a new photographic style is one of the demands of our times,”[4] but also consciously resurrected Bauhaus principles, as exemplified in his X-ray-like photogram Strenges Ballet, Hommage à Oskar Schlemmer of 1949/1950.
This group of young photographers, founded in 1949 by Peter Keetman, Otto Steinert, and Ludwig Windstosser was the nucleus of modernism in that country and especially what was called in ‘subjective photography’ to contrast with the ‘new objectivity’ of the pre-war period.