Katalog

95 The Significant Moment. Fred Stein’s Urban Photographs B E R N D H Ü P P A U F Several of Fred Stein’s portraits have become twentieth-century icons. His photographs of Albert Einstein (Princeton, 1946), Hannah Arendt (New York, 1949), and Hermann Hesse (Montagnola, 1961) have shaped our collective memory, but the photographer who took those images has remained hidden from the public eye. Despite the currency of the portraits in newspapers and magazines, among them Regards and L’humanité , and a number of solo exhibitions, Fred Stein is not celebrated as one of the stars in the history of photography. This is due to the market and the photographer. The market demands performance, the carefully staged public persona, the sensation. Stein could easily have ticked all of those boxes—an émigré in Paris and New York, the son of a rabbi, a secular intellectual with legal training thrown off course by the Nazis, a man with a biography full of dramatic events that link his life to the course of history. His flight from Paris to Marseille and the journey to the US aboard one of the last ships to leave France were no less gripping than the life stories of other emigrants that were turned into films or that are at the heart of Anna Segher’s novel Transit . But Stein had no taste for self-dramatization. A reserved man, he disliked the very idea of making himself into a public spectacle, and his photographs did not pander to the desire for sensationalism. Stein was a self-made man who had embarked on his career as a photographer from inauspicious beginnings. Using the camera he and his wife had given each other as a wedding present, he made himself into one of the more remarkable photographers of the twentieth century. It was the camera itself that had taught him how to take pictures, he occasionally explained. But there is none of the dilettantism of the amateur in the images of this self-taught photographer. Stein did indeed have an emotional connection with the cities and people he photographed. He translated his affection into an expres- sive visual language. Necessity and inclination prompted the lawyer who could not practice his profession in France to reinvent himself as a photographer. Within a few years of his flight from Dresden, he was invited to participate in exhibitions alongside photographers such as Man Ray, Ilse Bing, Brassaï, Dora Maar, Robert Doisneau and André Kertész. As a self-taught photographer Stein always struggled with his precarious financial situation, but he was free of the pressure clients put on professional photographers. Working independently, he could put more of himself into his work and create an authentic image. This aspect of non-professionalism comes to the fore in Stein’s urban photographs.