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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
Priester Max
Wilcke Willy
Chapter 10
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1898
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Max Priester/Willy Wilcke
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Bismarck on his Deathbed
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The Humanization
of Legend
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Shortly after Otto von
Bismarck's death, a death photograph that the public had never in fact
seen led to a sensational trial in Hamburg, Germany. The defendants were
two photographers who had secretly and illicitly captured the deceased
founder of the German Reich on film. Not until years after the end of the
Second World War was the photograph finally published.
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A great man has died. Think what
one may of Bismarck - and historians are still divided today over whether
he was a visionary or reactionary, a "white revolutionist" (Gall) or a
"daemon" (Willms) - there is one thing certain: he was one of the great
figures in nineteenth-century politics, and for a time he was the most
powerful man in Europe. This claim remains true even under the Hegelian
understanding of history, in which even the most influential individuals
are at best the 'business managers' of a predetermined 'purpose', that is,
mere assistants in the fulfillment of the inevitable course of history.
The majority of Germans, however, would have looked at the matter
differently around 1890. For them, Bismarck was the founder of a German
Reich with well-defined borders, the creator of a nation under Prussian
leadership. In those days, people still felt unreserved admiration for the
Junker stemming from the lands east of the Elbe, and throughout the
country, Bismarck towers and Bismarck memorials made of bronze or stone
reinforced the idea. On a popularity scale, Bismarck surpassed both
Wilhelm I and the reigning monarch Wilhelm II -a fact which the latter
realized all too well. In response, the young kaiser therefore repeatedly
sought some kind of reconciliation with the aged chancellor whom he had
disgracefully dismissed from office in 1890. But to no avail. Otto von
Bismarck nursed a resentment that might well be termed hatred and that was
to have repercussions even after his death.
Wilhelm was in no case to be
allowed to view Bismarck's mortal remains. By the time the kaiser, who had
been intentionally misled by those around him about Bismarck's true
condition, finally arrived in Friedrichsruh near Hamburg, the coffin had
already been sealed: Bismarck had thus effectively delivered an insult
from beyond the grave.
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Max Priester/Willy
Wilcke
Bismarck on his Deathbed
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Pictures of the Chancellor
produced at assembly line speed
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In fact, there were very few who
had been allowed to say farewell to Bismarck - family members, house
servants, a handful of neighbors from Friedrichsruh. Reinhold Begas was
refused permission to make a death-mask, the painter Franz von Lenbach, a
death portrait. Similarly, in the beginning, no one seems to have thought
about photographing the deceased - understandably from today's point of
view, although it must be remarked that the photographing of the dead
remained a completely common practice until the end of the nineteenth
century. One needs only to think of Ludwig II, whose picture lying in an
open coffin provoked almost no interest among the public. After Bismarck's
death, however, there was to be no picture that contradicted the official
iconography of the chancellor - in particular the image that had been
professionally formulated by Lenbach, that Munich-based prince of
painters, who had immortalized the Iron Chancellor in a number of oil and
chalk works (as if on an assembly line, according to the ironic opinion of
the painter's con-temporaries). In any case, Lenbach's chancellor was a
man of power, determination, and vision: a statesman in uniform, or
sometimes in black civilian dress; a great figure in the literal physical
sense. And now this travesty: a photograph of the deceased chancellor -
the legendary Bismarck - sunk into an unmade bed, the absolute opposite so
to speak of the familiar impressive figure exerting a powerful influence
on the observer in Lenbach's portraits. To make matters worse, the
photograph revealed a veritably shabby ambiance that one would hardly have
imagined possible of the former chancellor, with the chamber pot adding an
almost vulgar note to the scene. "Pure realism," as the Bismarck scholar
Lothar Machtan appropriately pointed out, and thus a possible corrective
to the stylized image that had been proffered by Bismarck himself- to the
presentation of himself according to the motto "nothing is truer than the
appearance" (Willms). For the kaiser, on the other hand, the photograph
would have seemed like a belated revenge.

Otto von
Bismarck
(1815-1898)
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The photograph had been taken by
the professional Hamburg photographers Max Priester and Willy Wilcke the
night that Bismarck died - admittedly without the family's permission. The
term 'paparazzo' had not yet been coined (Feflini introduced it in his
film La Dolce Vita), but Priester and Wilcke were consummate paparazzi in
the modern sense, motivated neither by personal curiosity nor even by a
sense of 'art'. Like the paparazzi of today, what they wanted was money,
and the ingredients for success were the same then as now, namely, the
interest of the public in the private lives of the prominent. As a vehicle
for conveying pictorial in-formation, however, the illustrated press of
the day was at best in a relatively archaic state. For technical reasons,
photographs often made their way into the press only by way of woodcuts.
But in Bismarck's case, the process never got that far. A civil suit, to
be discussed below, together with the prior confiscation of all pictures,
including "negatives, plates, prints, and other reproductions," by the
police - meant that the pictorial material was effectively removed from
the public sphere. The picture was in fact not published until
approximately two generations later in the Fronkfurter Illustrierte (No.
50/1952), a German magazine appearing from 1948 to 1962. On another
occasion, Die Welt (No. 270,19 November 1974) printed the photograph in
connection with a review of a book, Oevelgonner Nachtwachen, by the
Hamburg author Lovis H. Lorenz, in which he relates his version of the
photograph's history. Four years later, the picture appeared once more,
this time in the ZEIT-magazin (4 August 1978), accompanied by a text from
Fritz Kempe. It may be tempting to interpret the publication of the
once-taboo picture in a widely-circulated magazine ten years after the
student rebellions of the late Sixties as a further station in the process
of the Bismarck's demythification process. But in fact, the picture
probably contributed even more to the humanizing of Bismarck. The
photograph reveals that the circumstances of Prince Otto von Bismarck's
death were in fact rather trivial: in death he became one of us.
The air was full of rumors that Bismarck was dying. The old man,
increasingly depressed, had been ailing for quite some time. When gangrene
set in, it was clear that his days were numbered. In other words, a media
event, as we would term it today, was about to occur -and this in turn
required the 'right' pictures; that is, the most recent pictures had to be
rounded up for publication - and what could be more recent than a picture
of the deceased founder of the Reich. Two Hamburg photographers had
determined to obtain the necessary image: Max Priester and Willy Wilcke,
who had bribed a reliable informant in the person of Bismarck's forester,
Louis Sporcke. Now they had only to wait for the moment of death. An hour
before midnight on 30 July 1898 Otto von Bismarck died - according to
historians, after drinking a glass of lemonade. Then, "with a cry of
'For-ward!', he sank back into the pillows and died" (Willms). Sporcke,
who had kept the night watch, informed Priester and Wilcke, lodging nearby
and fully on the alert: the forester would leave the garden gate and
ground-floor window open for them. Toward four in the morning the pair
made their way in the house, exposed several plates with the help of the
magnesium flashes that were usual at the time. The whole procedure
supposedly lasted less than ten minutes, and on the following morning,
they returned to Hamburg and attempted to make money as quickly as
possible from their - as we would say today - scoop.
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Bismarck in the eye of the
imagination. Picture postcards of this kind went into circulation
shortly the death of the Chancellor.
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"In Remembrance of the Death
of the Great Chancellor":
picture postcard, pre 1900
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The incriminating materials
confiscated
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They advertised for interested
parties with money. "For the sole existing picture of Bismarck on his
deathbed, photographs taken a few hours after his death, original images,
a buyer or suitable publisher is sought," ran the announcement in the
Tagliche Rundschau of 2 August 1898. A Dr. Baltz, owner of a German
publishing house, replied that he was pre-pared to pay as much as thirty
thousand marks plus twenty percent of the profit for the images. All that
was necessary now was for the photo-graphers to obtain the family's
permission to publish. In response, Priester and Wilcke quickly produced a
retouched version of the picture, showing a clearly younger-looking
Bismarck, without headband or patterned handkerchief. The light-colored
chamber pot also fell victim to the practiced stroke of the retoucher. It
is quite possible that the Bismarcks might have granted permission to
publish, but in the meantime, a jealous competitor, Arthur Mennell, had
already stumbled upon the plan, and denounced Priester and Wilcke to the
family. The Bismarcks responded swiftly. By 4 August they had already
managed to have the incriminating materials confiscated. A civil and
criminal court case ensued, today remarkable in that the crime of
trespassing was not the sole charge: the question of the right to one's
own picture was also at issue. The case was decided in favor of Bismarck;
the photographers had not acted for the sake of the German people, but
merely in their own interest. The sentences handed down on 18 March 1899
were correspondingly harsh: five months for Sporcke, who also lost his
position as forester; eight months for Willy Wilcke along with the loss of
his title as court photographer; five months for Max Priester, who died at
age 45 in an institution for the mentally ill. The 'evidence' disappeared
into the Bismarcks' safe, "never to be turned over to the public,"
according to the express wish of the family. A clever photography
assistant named Otto Reich, however, had already made a print, and from
him Lovis H. Lorenz obtained possession of the picture, so declaimed,
after the war. Lorenz in turn handed the photograph over to the Hamburg
State Educational Institute, which kept the picture in their own
collection. What had clearly caused a scandal in 1898 was hardly capable
creating a public stir a decade after the Second World War. People had
other concerns. Paradoxically, the picture of the dead chancellor helped
to keep the otherwise distant and alien Bismarck alive, if not to bring
him closer. The photograph proved: Bismarck, too, had died a completely
normal, perhaps even trivial, death. A myth had become human.
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"A picture that was supposed to be
destroyed": Fritz Kempe's analysis of the photograph in ZEIT-magazin,
4.3.1973
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Frankfurter Illustnerte, no. 50,
1952: the magazine was the first to publish the confiscated Bismarck
photograph.
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