Staatliche Fachakademie für Fotodesign München

Modelled on Vienna's Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt[1] the training facility was founded as an initiative of the South German Photographers Association ('Süddeutschen Photographen-Vereins') on October 15, 1900 in Rennbahnstrasse, near Munich's Theresienwiese, as the "Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie” (“Teaching and Research Institute for Photography”), a Bavarian State Government Subsidised Educational Institution.

The founder was photographic supplies dealer Georg Heinrich Emmerich (1870–1923), a keen advocate for, and amateur exhibitor of, pictorialism, and frequent contributor to photography magazines, including Allgemeine Photographen-Zeitung.

[4] He announced his intention that the school should offer;"not mechanically learned soulless technique that left the stamp of artistic insignificance on the earlier products of professional photography, but rather expressing the individual capture of characteristic moments and one's own feelings in photographic works, recognising these principles that are indispensable for artistic creation in every single student: that is the task that the management primarily strives to carry out.” [5]The curriculum was broad, and included not only “practical photography with negative and positive processes”, retouching and reproduction technology, but also drawing, compositional theory, vignette painting, physics,[6] art and photography history, alongside commercial bookkeeping.

[7] Emmerich's son Walter E. Lautenbacher studied at the college from 1947 to 1949[8] and founded the Bund Freischaffender Fotodesigner (BFF) ('Association of Freelance Photo Designers') in 1969.

In 1907 Emmerich appointed another Pictorialist, the renowned American-born Frank Eugene, member of The Linked Ring and founder of the Photo-Secession, as a lecturer in 'Artistic Photography' until 1913, who during his tenure and with Alfred Stieglitz who visited him in 1907,[16] experimented with colour autochromes.

The connection between the institution's post-WW2 design emphasis and fotoform, an avant-garde movement that promoted formalism in the service of a subjective and purely artistic, non-applied intent, is apparent.

In 1949 Keetman was a founding member of fotoform and his were key works in the exhibition Subjective Photography put together by Otto Steinert in 1951 with an accompanying photo book.