"Eichenkamp bei Wamel"

gelatin silver print

Like many other late works by photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, this picture was taken in his late hometown of Wamel in North Rhine-Westphalia. After the Second World War with its devastating bombing raids had destroyed a large part of his work, Renger-Patzsch retreated to Wamel in the municipality of Möhnesee and cultivated nature photography.
Albert Renger-Patzsch rejected art photography and did not want to be considered an artist. He considered himself a photographer and urged his colleagues to leave art to the artists and instead concentrate on honest and objective photographic quality. In several essays he emphasized this point of view and spoke out against any interpretation of his works, insisting that they should be understood solely as photographic documentation. This philosophy shaped his entire oeuvre and paved the way for New Objectivity.
Although he himself had no artistic intention, Albert Renger-Patzsch's photographs have great aesthetic and artistic value. His finely composed photographs of modern landscapes in particular, in which factory chimneys and trees merge into a fascinating interplay of buildings and nature, reveal his deliberately melancholy and sombre visual language. Albert Renger-Patzsch's supposed documentations are thus always more than mere illustrations.
Around a decade after Renger-Patzsch took the photograph, it appeared in an illustrated book published by Siepmann-Werke, a steel construction company in the neighboring municipality. "In this volume, we show friends of our factory pictures of the landscape in which we live and work, from which we draw joy and strength for our daily work. We have sought to reproduce what has become apparent to us in our intimate contact: its essential features, the secret life that escapes the fleeting glance, the beauties that can be discovered off the beaten track, the richness of forms in the changing seasons. Albert Renger-Patzsch knew how to find and capture this,” writes Walter Siepmann in the foreword to the 1957 photo book.¹
(Christoph Fuchs, translated by deepl)

1
Siepmann-Werke, Pictures from the landscape between the Ruhr and Möhne rivers, Belecke (Möhne) 1957. Online at https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/449865/1 (2024-06-11)