Photojournalism and Essays
His first solo exhibition Sunday with the Bridge, studies of Brooklyn Bridge, opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 1956. In 1962, his book and exhibition Our Daily Bread toured widely around the United States. Many more exhibits followed over the years, in the United States, Japan, and throughout Europe. He lectured at the Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria, at the Syracuse University School of Journalism, among others, taught at workshops and seminars, and received commendations including the Photokina award (Cologne, Germany), the CRAF International Award (Italy), the Newhouse Citation in Photography (US) and numerous Art Directors Club awards.
His principal interest, in photography as in life, was the way in which people relate both to their natural surroundings and to the environments they create. Our Daily Bread and The World of Work were continuing long-term projects. He documented not only industry and technology – glass-making, boat-building, farming, food production, aviation, construction, space exploration, scientific research - but also the human cultural and geographical context: Shakespeare's England, James Joyce's Dublin or Thomas Mann's Venice.
His personal projects reveal a fascination with the way technology can embody beauty: the abstract patterns of ink drops in water, intimate portraits of tiny precision-manufactured components or laser light in natural and man-made environments: "In the 1970s he became obsessional with laser light, Ruth Hartmann remembers. He saw there a way to make light truly "write", to "photo" ""graph". He began experimenting with diffusing laser light through different kind of glass, through prisms, lenses of all kinds, through faceted doorknobs, breaking the light into pieces to make designs, to write. He then refined his techniques so as to be able to impose a controlled image of concentrated light on landscapes, then on people. This culminated in a major show in New York and other smaller shows."
One of his most penetrating and poignant work however, explores a vision of the emptiness that can lie within the worlds that human beings make for themselves, as exemplified in his photographs in a mannequin factory crowded with insensate yet suffering faces.
This concern with dehumanization led him undertake in his late years a very personal and intimate project that transcended memory.
Read more about this topic: Erich Hartmann (photographer)
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