Up Close and Personal
Aenne Biermann
Today, Aenne Biermann (1898 – 1933) is considered one of the most significant European avant-garde photographers from the period around 1930. She was a German photographer of Jewish origin and was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). A significant artistic movement that emerged in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s as a counter to expressionism. The term New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) highlights the movement’s unsentimental preoccupation with reality and focus on the world of objective phenomena, in contrast to the more romantic or idealistic tendencies of expressionism.
Biermann was a self-taught photographer. Following the birth of her children she purchased photographic equipment with the aim of documenting her children’s development for the family album. She found her motifs in her immediate personal surroundings. She created images of plants, rocks, children, landscapes and architecture. Her work became internationally known in the late 1920s.
She developed a disease that proved incurable of which she died in January 1933 at the age of 34. A few years after that, during the family’s escape to Palestine, a shipping container holding her over 3.400 carefully numbered negatives was confiscated by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Only 400 photographs transported in her family’s luggage and dispersed to friends and museums in her lifetime survived.
For decades nothing was heard of Aenne Biermann’s work. That started to change in 1987 when her work was re-introduced to the public through an exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Now, a new publication Aenne Biermann: Up Close and Personal is introducing her to new audiences. Despite Aenne Biermann’s early death and the devastation of her family, her circle of friends and her oeuvre by the National Socialists and the war important components of her work have managed to survive.
Up Close and Personal
Photographer: Aenne Biermann
Publisher: Scheidegger & Spiess
Published in 2021
Paperback, 22 x 30,5 cm, 148 pages, 123 duotone illustrations
Edited by Raz Samira
Contributions by Simone Förster, Bernhard Maaz, Raz Samira, Edna Goldacki-Biermann and Ornan Rotem
Special mention for the Historical Book Award 2022 at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles