by Gerald Boerner
“For me Ernst was sensitivity itself….”
— Author Unknown
“Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the ‘ah-ha’.”
— Ernst Haas
“The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.”
— Ernst Haas
“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
— Ernst Haas
“A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?”
— Ernst Haas
“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”
— Ernst Haas
“I don’t believe in photography for photography, I believe that a photographer has to be linked to all the other arts.”
— Ernst Haas
“…a free spirit, untrammeled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography.”
— Edward Steichen
“In my estimation we have experienced an epoch in photography. Here is a free spirit, untrammeled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography…”
— Edward Steichen
“With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.”
— Ernst Haas
Ernst Haas (1921 – 1986)
Ernst Haas was an artist and influential photographer noted for his innovations in color photography, experiments in abstract light and form, and as a member of the Magnum Photos agency.
Ernst Haas began his photographic career in the 1940s in Vienna, rising to fame following the publication of his photo essay on returning prisoners of war from Russia. Haas chanced upon his subjects at Vienna’s train station after a fashion shoot was cancelled. In 1951, Haas visited America and decided to make his home in New York, and it was at this point in his career that he began to photograph in color and establish himself as one of the early pioneers of color photography. Haas later became renowned for his work with motion photography of bullfights, nature and athletics. He also found success in the corporate advertising market with campaigns for companies such as Marlboro, Chrysler and Volkswagen.
Photography career
Haas moved to New York City and in 1953 produced a 24-page, color photo essay on the city for Life, which then commissioned similar photo spreads on Paris and Venice. In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of Haas’ color photos. Haas’ first photo book, Elements, was published the next year.
Some of Haas’ most famous pictures were deliberately out-of-focus and blurred, creating strong visual effects. He used the dye transfer process to make many of his original prints, yielding richly saturated colo rs.
Although Haas photographed in a straight documentary style, he gradually became more involved in the interpretive possibilities with color photography in keeping with a man who was intensely interested in poetry, music, and paining. "I don’t beleive in photography for photography," he has said. "I believe that a photographer has to be linked to all the other arts."
Edward Steichen called Hass "a free spirit, untrammeled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography," and gave him the first color exhibition ever held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Haas photographed in Venice, Germany, the Himalayas and continued his love with America, but his final great work of his life, which ended so abruptly in 1986 at the age of 65, brought him to Japan five times to photograph landscapes and personal projects.
Color Photography
Within two years, Haas was working in the United States. While photographing in black and white in the New Mexico desert, he experienced a great longing for color. Thus began a life-long odyssey of exploration of the uses and meaning of color in photography.
Haas’s frustration with the limitations of technology pushed him at every turn to be slightly ahead of his time. He was a technological pioneer with the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet. It has been written that before Haas there was no color photography, only colored photographs.
Haas’s first color essay was on New York, the city he would ultimately make his home. When the editors of LIFE magazine saw it, they gave it an unheard-of layout of 24 pages and called it "Magic Images of a City". Essays on Paris and Venice followed.
Ten years later, when the Museum of Modern Art held their first color retrospective, it was the work of Haas they chose to feature.
Though a Magnum photographer in the heyday of photojournalism, Haas was not interested in color as reportage. He was interested in the super-reality of dreams. To achieve this he gave commonplace objects and silhouettes new meaning. A reflection brought home the hidden depths underlying a conventional urban storefront; torn posters peeling off buildings shaped themselves into an art gallery. In his quest to produce feelings, he introduced hues and tones never before seen in printed color. And at all times his work was informed and enlightened by a guiding intelligence capable of great and quizzical humor.
Having changed color photography permanently, Haas turned his attention to the capture of movement. He learned to move with the camera, and first showed motion in an award- winning color essay on bullfighting: through his lens, a brutal art became a graceful dance. Later, investigating sports of all kinds, he captured the exhilaration of speed with a previously unseen clarity. He explained:
"To express dynamic motion through a static moment became for me limited and unsatisfactory. The basic idea was to liberate myself from this old concept and arrive at an image in which the spectator could feel the beauty of a fourth dimension, which lies much more between moments than within a moment. In music one remembers never one tone, but a melody, a theme, a movement. In dance, never a moment, but again the beauty of a movement in time and space."
In 1958 an international panel of 243 eminent critics, teachers, editors, art directors and other photography professionals voted on the world’s 10 Greatest Photographers for Popular Photography magazine. They were: Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ernst Haas, Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, Gjon Mili, Irving Penn, and W. Eugene Smith.
Haas later pushed the boundaries of still and motion photography even further, directing The Creation sequence (based on the book of Genesis) for John Huston’s 1964 film, The Bible. His belief that a series of images seen together added up to more than the sum of their parts also led him to produce four monumental photographic books. The product of thirteen years of work, The Creation (1971) was the most successful color photography book of its time, selling over 350,000 copies.
Commissioned for the bicentennial, Haas regarded his second book, In America (1975), as "a love letter" to his adopted country, a love affair that had begun when he was a boy in Vienna, his imagination aflame with stories of American Indians. In Germany (1976) represented a return to and investigation of his European roots, and Himalayan Pilgrimage (1978) showed his increasing concern with spiritual matters.
In his quest for a more visually attuned world, he created the four part television series The Art of Seeing. He felt equally strongly about his black and white photography as about his color; each was suitable for different modes of expression.
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Ernst Haas that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_%C3%81lvarez_Bravo
Also:
Ernst Haas Biography…
http://design-o-matic.com/work/haas/bio.html and
http://www.ernst-haas.com/essays.html
Comments