Styles / Modernist
Subjektive Fotografie
- Key: a lamp, sign or screen, from behind the subject, hard.
- Black flag: a black card, about 60° to the camera’s right, soft.
Silhouette: expose for the bright background and leave the subject unlit. No fill: a black card on the shadow side keeps the shadows dark (negative fill).
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Black-and-white photographs that turn what the camera sees into the photographer's own picture: lamps and lights drawn into looping traces, telephone wires reduced to black lines on a white sky, chimneys printed in negative, a face set beside its own reversed image, objects laid on paper as photograms. Contrast is pushed until the middle greys drop out and depth flattens into graphic form. Each print is reworked in the darkroom and shown as a finished single image in exhibitions and books.
Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs Its portrait light in the lab
How the look is made
- Treat the subject as raw form: go close, look steeply down or up, or isolate it against the sky, until wires, lamps, plants or a face read as lines, dots and shapes rather than things.
- Push the print to hard black and white: let the middle greys drop out and set dark shapes against empty white, or white lines against black.
- Let light and time draw: expose for seconds, move the camera or the light, and keep the traces of lamps, headlights and passers-by in the picture.
- Make the picture in the darkroom: print the negative as a positive, solarise, re-copy, combine a positive with its own negative, or lay objects directly on the paper.
- Finish each picture as a single, self-sufficient print for the exhibition wall or the book page, not as a record of what was there.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: a lamp, sign or screen, from behind the subject, hard.
Black flag: a black card, about 60° to the camera’s right, soft.
- Silhouette: expose for the bright background and leave the subject unlit.
- No fill: a black card on the shadow side keeps the shadows dark (negative fill).
- Shadow edges
- Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows with no fill at all that fall to pure black with no detail, so parts of the subject disappear.
- Highlights
- The brightest parts burn out to pure white with no detail, on purpose or because the light was too strong.
How the style is lit
- Street lamps, headlights and other lights at night, recorded as traces during an exposure of seconds or while the camera or the light moves.
- A bright, empty sky behind wires, lamps or chimneys, so that they read as black lines and shapes.
- A bare lamp over photographic paper with objects laid on it, for photograms.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/9.5 on 6 × 6 cm gives about the depth of field of f/5.2 on full frame.
- Keep the long time for the movement: an ND filter of about 1 stop cuts the light enough.
- 1/4 s: on a tripod.
- Then
- 40–50 mm · f/5.6–f/16 · 1/250–30 s on 6 × 6 cm, inferred from the gear and the look. A Rolleiflex (Keetman's only camera at Volkswagen in 1953) or a 35 mm camera, about 40–50 mm equivalent. Luminograms are exposures of seconds with the shutter open on lights; f/5.6–f/16 and 1/250 s for daylight and close work are inferred, and much of the picture is made in the darkroom.
- Focal length
- Very close focus: small things at life size or larger.
- Angle
- Looking down on the subject.
- Distance
- Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
- Balance
- Tilted lines and oblique movement drive the picture.
- Crop & fill
- Detail runs to every edge with no single centre. The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame. A small subject in a large empty field.
- Depth
- Depth collapsed into pattern and flat shapes.
- Duration
- Seconds or more: water turns to mist, lights become trails. Moving things smeared across the frame.
- Many times
- Moving lights drawn into a long exposure.
Direct
Most pictures have no one in them. For a portrait, bring the sitter close and still, face square to the lens and eyes into it, expression blank, hands out of frame, no props; light one half of the face hard from the side. Passers-by appear only as single blurred walkers or a foot in mid-step, never as a posed group.
- Without a pose
- No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
Style the set
Nothing is styled: wires, street lamps, chimneys, plants and pavements are taken as found, and objects for photograms are laid straight on the paper. Sitters wear plain, dark, simple clothes with their hair as it is, against an empty dark or pale ground with no set or props.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Monochrome
- A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys. Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
- Post-production
- Areas lightened and darkened by hand in printing. Several photographs combined into one picture. Tones and colours shown reversed, dark for light, as in a negative, by choice rather than as the white silhouettes any photogram or cyanotype makes.
- Shown as
- Each picture stands on its own.
- Shown in
- The book as the main form of the work.
Stay away from soft focus & diffusion, gum & pigment processes, saturated colour, hand-coloured, objective & scientific, open, filled shadows, studio props and smiling.
Before you shoot it
The photographs are in copyright (Steinert died in 1978, Keetman in 2005, Schneiders in 2006). Steinert's archive is held by the Museum Folkwang in Essen, while the rights lie with his estate: the Met credits '© Marlis Steinert, Thônex', and the Getty's prints carry the 'Nachlass-Estate Otto Steinert' stamp of Stefan Steinert. Keetman's archive is at the F. C. Gundlach Foundation. The movement offered German photography an artistic new start after the Nazi period, but some members had wartime pasts: Steinert joined the NSDAP in 1936, then served as a Wehrmacht medical officer in France and on the Eastern Front (1940–43) and on the Army General Staff in Berlin until 1945; Toni Schneiders volunteered for the paratroops and worked as a war reporter in France and Italy from 1942; Peter Keetman was called up as a railway pioneer in 1940 and came back seriously injured in 1944. Keep that history in view when presenting the style.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- Luminogramm, Paris , Otto Steinert, 1952. J. Paul Getty Museum.
- Punkte und Linien , Otto Steinert, 1953. J. Paul Getty Museum.
- 1001 Faces , Peter Keetman, 1956. Art Institute of Chicago.
- Bildnis Hell-Dunkel , Otto Steinert, 1950. J. Paul Getty Museum.
- 4 Schornsteine – negativdruck , Otto Steinert, 1948. J. Paul Getty Museum.
With other styles
Pairs with New Vision. New Vision supplied the photogram, the negative print and the hard crop; borrow its steep top-down and bottom-up viewpoints when a subjective abstraction needs the energy of the modern city.
Pairs with Surrealist photography. Surrealist photographers used the same solarisation and doubled images on faces; take their low-key studio light and body fragments when a darkroom portrait should feel uncanny rather than purely formal.
The opposite: New Objectivity photography. New Objectivity keeps the thing sharp, frontal and itself in a straight print; decide whether a close-up should catalogue its subject or dissolve it into form, and print it accordingly.
The opposite: Straight photography. Straight photography rules out the darkroom transformations subjective photography depends on; print one negative both ways to see where the photographer's own choice begins.
Pairs with Fotoclubismo (Escola Paulista). São Paulo's camera club worked the same years with the same means (hard light, abstraction, cut and drawn-on negatives); borrow its tropical sun and city geometry when a subjective abstraction should stay legible as a place.
Sources
- Subjektive Fotografie, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjektive_Fotografie (founded in the early 1950s by Otto Steinert of fotoform as artistic photography; not the objective reality of a situation but its pictorial interpretation; mostly black and white, abstract forms, graphic structures, lines of light and shadow, high contrast, radical crops, negative prints and solarisation; fotoform organised the first exhibition in Saarbrücken in 1951; representatives Kilian Breier, Chargesheimer, Paul Facchetti, Heinz Hajek-Halke, Peter Keetman, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert, Carl Strüwe, Ludwig Windstosser; traditions reaching back to the Bauhaus)
- Fotoform, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotoform (founded 1949 by Lauterwasser, Keetman, Reisewitz, Schneiders, Steinert and Windstosser; first appearance at the Photokina 1950; Steinert's 1951 Saarbrücken exhibition included all members; Hajek-Halke and Christer Christian joined in 1953; aim to reconnect with Neue Sachlichkeit and Neues Sehen; the 'geformte Einzelbild'; photomontage, photogram, solarisation, negative print, luminogram, selective crops, strong contrasts and extreme perspectives)
- Steinert, Otto, Deutsche Biographie (NDB): https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/11875324X.html (1915–1978; joined the Wehrmacht medical corps in 1937, on the Western and Eastern fronts 1940–43, then in Berlin; photo class in Saarbrücken from 1948, director 1952; co-founded fotoform in 1949; exhibitions subjektive fotografie 1951, 1954 and 1958 with a historical section of Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Man Ray; 'vom ungegenständlichen Fotogramm bis zur psychologisch vertieften und bildmäßig geformten Reportage'; rejected painterly 'Kunstfotografie'; the darkroom as main workplace: re-copying, solarisation, negative prints, calculated re-exposure; Maske einer Tänzerin, 1952; photograms of the late 1940s, luminograms of the 1950s)
- Otto Steinert, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Steinert (NSDAP member from 1 June 1936; assistant physician in the French campaign in 1940, Oberarzt and then Stabsarzt in the Russian campaign 1941–43, then adviser to the army's chief physician on the Army General Staff in Berlin until the end of the war; teaching in Saarbrücken from 1948 and at the Folkwangschule Essen from 1959; Fahles Portrait, 1949, solarised negative print; exhibitions subjektive fotografie I–III 1951, 1954, 1958; Subjektive Fotografie. Ein Bildband moderner Fotografie, Brüder Auer, Bonn, 1952 and 1955; estate at the Museum Folkwang)
- Otto Steinert, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Steinert (light, motion and abstraction; long exposures, camera movement, unconventional framing; ideas introduced in Japan in 1954, the Japan Subjective Photography League founded in 1956 and the First International Subjective Photography Exhibition later that year, with a Steinert-curated international section)
- Otto Steinert, Encyclopædia Universalis: https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/otto-steinert/ (fotoform 1949; Photokina 1950; abstract images, often close-ups of natural motifs; manipulated negatives and prints; the 1958 exhibition announced the end of the concept)
- Subjektive Fotografie, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 November 1984: https://www.csmonitor.com/1984/1105/110500.html (the 1951 and 1954 exhibitions shown in the US, Japan and Europe; the world of appearances subordinated to the photographer's choices; darkroom manipulation; Pale Portrait with the face reversed to a white pattern on black)
- Peter Keetman, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Keetman (1916–2005; called up as a railway pioneer in 1940, returned seriously injured in 1944; founding member of fotoform in 1949; Eine Woche im Volkswagenwerk, Wolfsburg, April 1953; archive at the F. C. Gundlach Foundation)
- Heinz Hajek-Halke, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Hajek-Halke (1898–1983; member of fotoform; Experimentelle Fotografie: Lichtgrafik, Athenäum, Bonn, 1955; Lichtgrafik, Econ, 1964)
- Toni Schneiders, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Schneiders (1920–2006; volunteered for the paratroops and was a front reporter there; war reporter in France and Italy from 1942; co-founder of fotoform; closely involved in subjective photography in the 1950s)
- Luminogramm, Paris, J. Paul Getty Museum: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109NZY (Otto Steinert, 1952, gelatin silver print, 2018.47.3)
- Streetlights on Place de la Concorde 3 (Lampen der Place de la Concorde 3; Luminogramm 2), Harvard Art Museums: https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/221464 (Otto Steinert, 1952, gelatin silver print, 1991.52; Busch-Reisinger Museum)
- Luminogram, Victoria and Albert Museum: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1059211/luminogram-photograph-otto-steinert (Otto Steinert, 1952, gelatin silver print, PH.307-1985; 'Dark lines both straight and curved'; label: 'He created this composition by capturing trails of light with a long exposure')
- Punkte und Linien, J. Paul Getty Museum: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1CQWPQ (Otto Steinert, 1953, ferrotyped gelatin silver print, 2024.166)
- Bildnis Hell-Dunkel, J. Paul Getty Museum: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109NZM (Otto Steinert, 1950, gelatin silver bromide print, 2018.57.3)
- 4 Schornsteine – negativdruck, J. Paul Getty Museum: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109NZF (Otto Steinert, 1948, gelatin silver print, 2018.57.7; 'A negative image of four smokestacks'; estate stamp 'NACHLASS-ESTATE OTTO STEINERT / Standfoto aus dem Film "Stein auf Stein," 1948 / STEFAN STEINERT'; In Copyright, courtesy Galerie Johannes Faber)
- Call, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266349 (Otto Steinert, 1950, gelatin silver print, 1991.1056; rights: '© Marlis Steinert, Thônex')
- Forelle, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/263077 (Toni Schneiders, 1950, gelatin silver print, 1981.1169.2)
- 1001 Faces, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/66105 (Peter Keetman, 1956, gelatin silver print, 1986.1392)
- Ein-Fuß-Gänger, Paris 1950, Leitz Photographica Auction, lot 50: https://www.leitz-auction.com/en/OTTO-STEINERT-1915-1978-Ein-Fuss-Gaenger-Paris-1950/A02056 (vintage silver print, titled by the photographer; from the Foto Cine Club Bandeirante, shown in 'Otto Steinert and his students', Museum of Modern Art São Paulo, 1955, in collaboration with the FCCB)
- Japan Subjective Photography League, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Subjective_Photography_League (founded May 1956 in response to the international reception of Steinert's Subjektive Fotografie; First International Subjective Photography Exhibition, Nihonbashi Takashimaya, Tokyo, December 1956, organised with Sankei Camera, Steinert selecting work from fourteen countries)
- Peter Keetman: 70 Jahre Volkswagen 1953, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg: https://www.kunstmuseum.de/en/exhibition/peter-keetman-70-jahre-volkswagen-1953/ (Keetman: 'I had only a Rolleiflex, a few rolls of film, and a tripod, but no lighting, no flash'; 'I could only take the pictures by natural daylight')
- Luminogram, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminogram (the fotoform group made luminograms from 1949; Steinert and Keetman pointed 'a camera, with shutter open, at light sources to produce light trails')
- Luminogram, Victoria and Albert Museum: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1059211/luminogram-photograph-otto-steinert (Otto Steinert, 1952; label: 'He created this composition by capturing trails of light with a long exposure')
- Rolliflex camera, Science Museum Group Collection (Kodak Collection): https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8206661 (twin-lens reflex for 120 roll film 2¼ × 2¼ in.; taking lens Zeiss Tessar 7.5 cm f/3.5–22; shutter 1 to 1/300 s, B and T)