The current exhibition “Sachliche Fotografie” (Objective Photography) presents selected incunabula from the renowned Cologne photo atelier Fotowerkstätte Schmölz. The focus of this show is on the images, often stringently minimalist, of cinema interiors, staircases and industrial architecture.

All images by Karl Hugo Schmölz (1917-1986) display outstanding artistic quality and a unique signature brand of technical perfection. During his lifetime, Karl Hugo Schmölz had already made a name for himself far beyond his native Germany with his special lighting technique, which lends the photographs, especially the architectural interiors, an often hyper-realistic sharpness and depth.

Another feature of the trademark Schmölz approach is the impeccable preparation done for each photograph. Absolutely nothing was left to chance, producing results that were head and shoulders above the work of many contemporaries. This pre-planning involved gaining an exact appreciation of the volume and expressive quality of the subject in question, be it an interior, a passageway or an entire building, so that the photographic presentation would not just show surfaces but also manage to capture depth-of-space and a characteristic atmosphere.

The images produced by Schmölz communicate a palpable sense of materiality: the viewer can virtually feel the coolness of metal, the softness of fabric, the smooth sensual patina of polished wood, the bright light piercing a clear pane of glass. Here, Schmölz reveals himself to be a genius in his use of light: existing natural light, additional technical lighting apparatus, and the combination of the two, to mutually enhancing effect. Finally, the precise positioning of the camera, the exactly defined height of the sight line, and the exposure time were all decisive factors in the representation of spatial and architectural situations. That applies especially to the industrial photographs.

Without a doubt, Karl Hugo Schmölz holds a special place among the German architectural photographers of the 1950s. Profoundly knowledgeable and passionate about architecture, his engagement is reflected in a large circle of architect friends. The exceptional significance of Schmölz lies in his success in developing a photographic language to consistently communicate his passion in sober, objective perfection.

Thanks to their aesthetic precision and intellectual acumen the photographic images of postwar ruins captured by Karl Hugo Schmölz (1917-1986) are an outstanding example of how a photo-documentary commission can become an artistic work of the highest order. The photography of Schmölz (father and son) now justifiably enjoys worldwide acclaim for an objective language of imagery that lends individual value to each detail that makes up the whole. This quality also characterizes this series of works from 1947 that, seen from a contemporary perspective, could easily be classified as “conceptual”. When, in the 1960s, architect Richard Neutra asked his trusted photographer Julius Shulman which colleague in Germany had the “right stuff” to document his buildings there, Schulman could name only one: Karl Hugo Schmölz.

This extraordinary series of photographs has a notable backstory: in 1947 the head of the official news agency of the city of Cologne was looking for a photographer capable of producing images that would give an immediate impression of the city center, ninety percent of which had been destroyed in the war, in direct confrontation with images of the prewar, still intact Cologne. By 1947, most of the city center had been cleared of rubble and planning for a new beginning was imminent. In other words, the task at hand was to make a direct photographic comparison between prewar and postwar Cologne, aimed at supporting key politicians and promoting public acceptance for realizing a program of quick reconstruction. Several names, among them August Sander, were under discussion. But the logical choice was soon made: Karl Hugo Schmölz, only recently returned to the city after release from POW captivity. In the few months since his homecoming he had already regained his prewar footing as the most sought-after architecture photographer in town – also due to the fact that his photography studio, Fotowerkstätte Schmölz, had survived the carpet-bombing of Cologne more or less unscathed.

Karl Hugo Schmölz, who owed his prodigious technical and aesthetic capabilities to the close collaboration with his father Hugo (1879-1938), combed the intact glass plate negative archive of Schmölz, Sr. and collaborative works, searching specifically for images of the city and its buildings from before the destruction. There, in the fully preserved documentation, were recorded the time of day, focal length and light conditions of each photograph taken. Schmölz decided to take the new, postwar pictures using the exact same photographic technique, in the same light conditions from the exact same angle and perspective as the postwar shots. He printed the images from both the “before” and ”after” negatives himself, all in the exact same quality, so that in some pictures the viewer has the impression that the two “paired” shots were taken only moments apart, just enough time for the clouds to have moved out of the frame. It is here that an intense emotionality wells up behind the strict objectivity of the photographs. The photo duos were mounted in purposed-produced photo books. At least three of these image pairs are now well known and belong to the city of Cologne. Our vintage prints are from the Schmölz collection itself. Never having been mounted with adhesives, they are in museum quality. In addition to 24 of the diptychs described here, the exhibition features a further 20 original prints of photographs of the destroyed postwar cityscape; skeletal bridges, and boulevards along which hardly a structure is left standing. We see architectural incunabula, such as Cologne’s famous Romanesque churches, and, of course, its iconic cathedral (only slightly damaged, the single remaining edifice in a field of rubble), the Oper am Ring, the airport, representative buildings and eerie industrial steel ruins.

In these so highly disciplined efforts at extreme objectivity the horror of the events depicted seems perhaps even more intense. In 1982, the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum published 26 of these diptychs from its own collection in a book to accompany an exhibition.

The Van der Grinten Galerie is delighted to announce the exhibition Essenz der Architekturfotografie (The Essence of Architectural Photography). The show provides the welcome opportunity to present, for the very first time, all three fundamental aspects of the photographic works of the Fotowerkstätte Hugo Schmölz – the studios of father and son Hugo Schmölz and Karl Hugo Schmölz – in a cohesive context.

Hugo Schmölz (1879-1938), an exponent of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) school of photography, was one of a triumvirate – alongside Albert Renger-Patzsch and Werner Mantz – of preeminent German architectural photographers of the 1920s and 30s. Hugo Schmölz is represented in the show with a selection of industrial and interior architecture images from the pre-war period. Son Karl Hugo (1917-1986), who embarked on his professional training at father ’s studio at the age of 17, later interpreted the pure aesthetics of the strictly objective view for the post-war era of modernity like no other, which soon brought Karl Hugo Schmölz success and acclaim far beyond his Rhineland home base. Especially noteworthy achievements in the genre are his architectural photographs of staircases, cinema interiors and night shots of display windows.

Thanks to a very small number of extant private (non-commissioned) images by Karl Hugo Schmölz a third, seldom seen aspect of the oeuvre adds a narrative layer and brings personal and historical context to the exhibition: the war just over, Karl Hugo, on his release from POW internment, returned home to a war-ravaged Cologne to find that his father’s photographic archives had somehow survived the saturation bombing of the city. He selected from the collection views of the city and “portraits” of historical buildings in the center of town taken by Hugo Schmölz before the destruction. Karl Hugo then photographed the exact same places from the exact same camera position and perspective, now in their state of immediate postwar devastation. This idea, while still adhering to the “applied” principals of photography to which both father and son Schmölz always remained dedicated, nevertheless constitutes an astonishing move towards the conceptual. Some comparable examples of these remarkable diptychs were recently on view in the ‚Doing the Document / Schenkung Bartenbach’ show at Museum Ludwig.

The opening on 8 February is also a book presentation for our latest publication ‘Cinemas’, a compilation of the iconic images of cinema interiors by Schmölz father and son. The book appears in the program of the Kettler Verlag. A literary essay by Hanns Zischler accompanies the substantial photographic content.

The publication also includes a limited collector’s edition of 35 numbered copies with a modern print of the motif ‘Europa Palast, Düsseldorf, 1949’ (pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 19 x 21 cm) by Karl Hugo Schmölz, certified by the Archiv Wim Cox.

In 2017 Karl Hugo Schmölz’s birthday will come around again for the one-hundredth time. He is gradually being recognized for the significance of his own architectural photographs and for the history of German photography in general. Which was the occasion for us to devise an exhibition that shows further aspects of his work against this background. Many visitors will, along with the industrial photos, newly discover those of staged objects and staged scenes with people in them who enliven the architectural “platform”. We show a selection of 40 vintage prints from the period, namely the time in which Karl Hugo Schmölz learned the aesthetics of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) from his father Hugo and translated it into postwar modernism, as well as conjuring it into his own distinctive photographic works.

Bernd & Hilla Becher saw Schmölz’s unprecedented photographs as being an amalgam between compositional reliability and technical perfection (also as regards his unique skill in portraying a room, a building or a whole area by day or night), thus creating a special rank for himself as well as for all of the Düsseldorf School of Photography.

In the meantime Karl Hugo Schmölz is considered the number one  German architectural photographer of the 1950s. His photographs find themselves in many prestigious photo collections worldwide and have been regularly shown in group exhibitions, for example in 2007 in Cologne, 2010 in Miami and Herford, 2012 in Bonn, 2013 in Winterthur, 2014 in The Hague, or 2015 in Cologne. His relationship to architecture, which is naturally reflected in his many architect friends, is knowledgeable and passionate. The fact that he evolved an objective vocabulary for it had made him, already during his lifetime, into one of the most sought-after photographers.

The photographies of Karl Hugo Schmölz belong to the best source material of Cologne’s rebuilding. They illustrate the city’s history in an detailed way and are also helpful documentations for historians and the protection of historical monuments.

In cooperation with his father and because of an enormous productivity he left a great work, which documents the architectural growing, the planning, the destruction and the rebuilding of Cologne almost complete since the Twenties.

Karl Hugo Schmölz and his father worked for nearly every architect of high standing, the planning department, building contractors and their clients and they documentated not only the building but also the sketches and models

The majority of the postwar-photographies Karl Hugo Schmölz made in the Hahnenstraße and it’s surrounding, because there – long time before the currency reform – the rebuilding has begun and he also was good friend with the architect of that street, Wilhelm Riphahn.

Riphahn and the mayor planner of Cologne, Rudolf Schwarz, made the plans for Cologne in that day, sometimes not quick enough or in favour for the architect’s plans. So the architects  beautified their buildings sometimes with illegal floors or details, which weren’t allowed by the city’s planning department. Schmölz photographed them, but he also made pictures after the floors and the details have been removed

Some houses with only two floors got enormous advertises or neon signs –a few still exist today– on their tops – to hide the missing of more floors – which were real highlights in the quickly and cheap reconstructed postwar surrounding.

Schmölz’ comprehensive photographic work of Cologne show clearly the economic upswing of that time combined with an enthusiam for planning and investations, but also the disagreements between architects and the planning department, which made the reconstruction sometimes slow or stopped it completely.

As early as 1948, the decision was taken in favor of a design for the new broadcasting house in Cologne that newly defined its mission and function, thus implementing a paradigm shift: away from the propaganda machine of the Nazi era and toward a cultural facility that allows the young democracy to participate in a social discourse. In regards to the future activity of concerts and events, the director, Hanns Hartmann, vehemently championed an inner-city location, and the architect Peter Friedrich Schneider (1901-1981), a student of Peter Behrens, developed an architecture meant to radiate openness and transparency. Thus one of the most remarkable buildings of the 1950s came to be built in Cologne.

Karl Hugo Schmölz (1917-1986) documented the entire construction with his camera: the façade, the inner courtyard in daytime and nighttime, the vestibule, staircases, small and large broadcasting halls, the tearoom, the main and upper foyers, and studios up to and including details of the furnishings such as technical installations, seating, lighting and art-in-architecture. The archive of the Schmölz photo workshop consists of around 200 negatives and the logbooks.
For the current exhibition, Van der Grinten Gallery chose, together with the archive, a series of 10 especially spectacular photos that are shown as modern prints (pigment prints on Hahnenmühle baryta paper. Size: ca. 80 x 60cm; edition of 3) on the gallery’s upper floor.

All of Karl Hugo Schmölz’s photographs have an enormous artistic quality and a singular technical perfection all their own. Already during his lifetime, Karl Hugo Schmölz was known far beyond Germany for his lighting techniques which gave his pictures, above all the interior shots, a partly hyperreal sharpness and depth. In addition his one-hundred percent preparation for a shooting was his special trademark that elevated him above many of his contemporaries. This preparation consisted of an exact capture of the interior space, the passage, the structural shell in its volume and effect, so as not just to be able to portray these later in a way that not only reproduced their exterior surfaces but also the space and the atmosphere. On Schmölz’s photos you can feel the coolness of metal, the softness of fabric, the pleasant shine of polished wood, the translucency of glass. Schmölz here proves he is a genius in his treatment of the available and the additional lighting as well as the combination of the two to their mutual benefit. And finally the choice of the camera angle, the exact definition of the height of the line of sight as well as the exposure time are of crucial importance for representing spatial and architectural situations.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the book “Karl Hugo Schmölz, Funkhaus Köln 1952” has been published in German and English for € 32 along with a special edition of 35 copies (book & later a color print of an original negative 1952/2014 in a slipcase) for € 385.

Additional exhibitions and publications in 2014 with photographs by Karl Hugo Schmölz are planned, among others, for the New Aachen Kunstverein and at the Deutsche Börse in Eschweiler/Frankfurt, which has recently bought an entire block of his works.

Translation: Jeanne Haunschild