The Port of Hamburg in the 1930s

In 1939, Hamburg celebrated the 750th anniversary of the port. To mark the occasion, the illustrated book Der Hafen (The Port) was published with photographs by Rolf Tietgens (1911-1984). The Hamburg native was a well-known photographer, but was already living in New York at the time of publication. He had emigrated at the end of 1938 because his life was threatened in National Socialist Germany due to his homosexuality and he no longer saw any professional prospects. Tietgens' photo book Die Regentrommel (The Rain Drum), which had been published a few years earlier and addressed, among other things, the catastrophic living conditions of Native Americans, had been banned by the National Socialist regime. Tietgens worked in the spirit of New Vision, a style of photography that broke away from the compositional schemes of painting and sought a dynamic, experimental expression characterized by the photographer's personal view. As Tietgens never returned to Germany, his work was slowly forgotten in his home country. The Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation in Berlin is now presenting a double exhibition that provides an insight into the photographer's work and contrasts it with that of Alfred Ehrhardt (1901-1984): Alfred Ehrhardt & Rolf Tietgens: The Port of Hamburg and the North Coast of Germany opens on April 12 at 7 p.m. and runs until July 7.

Alfred Ehrhardt's approach is more objective than that of Tietgens; his port photographs reveal Ehrhardt's work as a nature photographer and documentary filmmaker. He studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s and initially produced paintings and drawings. From the early 1930s onwards, he worked as a photographer and made a name for himself internationally as an avant-garde artist with abstract works that showed naturally occurring sand structures. The Foundation's current exhibition in Berlin is the first to show Ehrhardt's pictures of the Port of Hamburg.