Ernst Haas

Beginning with Black-and-White Photographs of Returning Soldiers

Haas was born in Vienna and turned seriously to photography after World War II. In 1947, a series on the reunion of returning prisoners of war with their families brought him attention. His official archive records that Life offered him a staff position, which he declined in order to preserve his independence.^*1That decision is important for understanding his later work. Haas did not reject the reach of the press; he avoided an exclusive staff role that would allow one editorial office to determine what, when, and in what form he photographed. The Hasselblad Foundation likewise emphasizes the value he placed on working outside the constraints of a single magazine and finishing material at his own pace.^*2 The National Gallery of Australia also cites Haas’s recollection that, in reaction to the gray devastation of the postwar environment, he “needed” color and wanted to celebrate hope for a new era through color photography.^*21 The move to color was therefore more than a change in taste from black-and-white reportage to decorative color. It was also a personal and historical problem of how photographic perception might be rebuilt after the experience of war.

Magnum and the Move to the United States

Invited by Robert Capa, Haas joined Magnum in 1949 and later took part in the organization’s administration. A WestLicht retrospective presents the progression from black-and-white reportage in postwar Vienna through migration to the United States and early color as a continuous development, showing how he pursued color experimentation while remaining inside the world of magazine journalism.^*3While early Magnum centered on black-and-white reportage, Haas deepened his work in color as a personal investigation. An Estate essay notes that black and white functioned at the time as a sign of “truthfulness” and noncommercial photography, while Haas began seriously pursuing the creative possibilities of color around 1952.^*4Color here was not simply an adoption of technological novelty. New York became a laboratory not because it contained many colors, but because color continually changed through light, advertisements, car bodies, glass, rain, and shadow. ICP records that Haas had studied photography at Vienna’s Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt before he owned a camera and acquired his first camera in 1946.^*25 The same ICP source notes that by 1949 he had bought a Leica and begun experimenting with color, extending the work into magazines, film, and combinations of sound and image at a time when color was widely considered inferior to black and white for “serious creative photography.”^*25 Haas’s specific importance lies not in the chance fact that he used color early, but in using professional training, Magnum reportage, magazine printing, and film as multiple sites from which to answer color’s low institutional status through the work itself.

Images of a Magic City—Reading the City Through Color

In 1953, Life published Haas’s New York color photographs across two issues and twenty-four pages. The Estate describes the feature as unprecedented in scale for the magazine and notes that it was followed by color essays on Paris and Venice.^*5The National Gallery of Australia’s history of color photography likewise identifies it as Life’s longest color story at the time and discusses Haas’s use of reflections and oblique viewpoints to turn the city into semi-abstract fields of color.^*21《Corner of 38th Street》uses signs, cars, and reflected color as fields that divide the picture rather than merely describe the city. MoMA records the work as a dye-transfer print and notes the printing process built from layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow.^*6The Met’s Conversation on Third Avenue survives as a 1950s chromogenic print and extends the same approach, with urban color fields and reflections structuring the image more strongly than the conversation between the figures.^*22 Retrospective material from the International Photography Hall of Fame likewise identifies Haas’s use of reflections, glass, and moving subjects with the relatively slow color film of the period as a technical means of freeing color from the fixed surface of objects.^*7

From Stopping Motion to Letting It Flow

On a 1957 bullfighting assignment in Spain, Haas moved the camera with his subjects instead of using a fast shutter to dissect movement, allowing contours and color to flow. His official chronology identifies this work as a turning point in his study of motion and notes that the 1958 Life essay The Magic of Color in Motion systematically developed color mixing through slow shutter speeds.^*8The Met’s chromogenic print The Bullfight shows that the experiment did not remain an effect of magazine reproduction; it also survived as an independent photographic print.^*23Haas described photography as a language of “light and time” and wrote that the photographer’s task was to give subjective order to objective chaos.^*9Blur here is not an embellishment that merely signals speed. Because the movement of subject and camera during exposure remains visible in a single frame, Haas used the idea of photography as a medium that “fixes an instant” in another direction. The Amon Carter Museum’s Cowboy and Bronco, New York, photographed in 1958 and later printed by dye transfer, likewise shows motion expressed through flowing contours, bands of color, and directional force as an independent color print rather than only as a magazine effect.^*28Comparison with Saul Leiter, who was also photographing New York in color during the 1950s, sharpens the distinction. The Milwaukee Art Museum describes Leiter’s color as an urban photography of fragments, using windows, obstructions, reflections, and muted tones to reveal partial views of everyday life.^*30 Haas also used reflections and compression, but he carried color into Life spreads and moving worlds such as sport, bullfighting, and traffic, using exposure time to turn the speed of a subject into a field of color. Comparing the two beyond the umbrella of “early color” makes clear that for Haas, color was not only urban atmosphere; it was also a device for recording time.

Magazine Layout Brings Color Photography to a Mass Audience

Haas’s color circulated widely in mass magazines before it entered the museum. Life combined double-page spreads, sequences, and photographs of different sizes to present cities and movement at a pace unlike that of the individual print. MoMA’s 1965 exhibition The Photo Essay included Haas and presented the magazine form itself—photography, text, and graphics composed into a unified statement—as a subject of photographic history.^*10This magazine experience cannot be ignored when later histories divide Haas into “art photography” and “commercial photography.” Color printing, page sequence, film publicity, and location work all provided conditions of reproduction that supported his visual experiments.

Film Sets and a Sense of Motion

From the late 1950s through the 1960s, Haas frequently worked on film stills and movie sets. The Estate’s introduction to On Set discusses his work with John Huston and other directors as a practice of photographing combat, dance, and actors in motion so that sequences of still images could generate time and narrative.^*11Film work cannot be claimed as the direct cause of Haas’s photographic techniques, but the environment of continuous movement, lighting, color, sets, and actors’ trajectories developed at the same time as his interest in expressing time through still images. The Estate’s exhibition history also records the later presentation of this material under the title Hollywood.^*12

MoMA 1962—Seeing Color in the Museum

In 1962, MoMA presented Ernst Haas: Color Photography, bringing together roughly a decade of color work. Exhibition records list about eighty photographs spanning New York, studies of motion including bullfighting and motor racing, nature, and the American landscape.^*13The museum’s press release that year positioned Haas’s color beyond the measure of journalistic record, as photography concerned with seeing itself. John Szarkowski likewise argued that where color had often functioned as decoration attached to the subject, Haas made the sensation of color itself the subject.^*14The exhibition’s historical significance lies in the movement of color that had circulated widely through Life in the 1950s into large prints examined as structures of perception. FUJIFILM SQUARE’s artist materials likewise treat Haas’s widely reproduced magazine color and the MoMA exhibition as a continuous career.^*18

“Pioneer of Color” Is Not Enough

Haas is frequently introduced as a pioneer of color photography, but the label has obscured his black-and-white work. ICP’s 1992 exhibition Ernst Haas in Black and White explicitly addressed the long underestimation of his black-and-white photographs of human life.^*15Later reassessment has not centered on color alone. The International Photography Hall of Fame cites the 1989 color retrospective, the 1992 Ernst Haas in Black and White, and the 2011 Color Correction, showing how posthumous publications and exhibitions have repeatedly revised his image.^*16 His historical position is therefore better understood through a practice moving among reportage, color, abstraction, and motion than as that of a technician progressing linearly toward color. Early black-and-white works such as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Vienna, 1947 confirm that before color, Haas was already photographing postwar cities and people through strong tonal and compositional organization.^*26 His later color work is therefore more accurately read as an extension of compositional habits formed through postwar observation into Kodachrome color fields and long exposure times than as a conversion that abandoned black-and-white reportage.

The Problem of Commercial Work and Delayed Recognition

Later histories of color photography have strongly centered William Eggleston and Stephen Shore within museum and photobook canons. Haas, by contrast, moved among Life, advertising, film sets, and museums from the 1950s onward, making him difficult to fit into later classifications that separate “commercial photography” from “fine-art photography.” MoMA’s artist history shows that his work was exhibited and collected before the 1962 solo show and that the museum continued to address both color and black-and-white photographs afterward.^*17The National Gallery of Australia places Haas among the innovators of color after explaining the long association of color with commercial fields and the tendency to treat black and white as the standard for “serious photography.”^*21Recent publications such as Color Correction and New York in Color, 1952–1962 have reedited the work around reflections, compression, blur, signage, and urban fragments rather than only the most saturated canonical images. The Estate bibliography documents this posthumous editorial history.^*19The Estate itself preserves more than 250,000 color transparencies, 100,000 black-and-white negatives, correspondence, and writings, giving current scholarship the potential to expand far beyond a limited set of magazine-published images.^*24Haas’s significance lies less in ranking him as a “pioneer of color” than in the way he joined color as subject, exposure time as form, and the magazine page as a site of circulation, demonstrating from the 1950s that color photography could carry complex content in both commercial and artistic settings. FUJIFILM SQUARE’s Japanese exhibition Ernst Haas: The Creation likewise brought together work across color, movement, abstraction, and nature, reconsidering the limitations of an image of Haas as merely a commercial photographer.^*20

Do Not Read Haas Backward from 1970s “New Color”

The canon of color photography is often narrated from the 1970s, when William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and others gained recognition through museums and photobooks.The Milwaukee Art Museum’s Color Rush, however, reconstructs an earlier history in which color developed across magazines, advertising, museums, and street photography, with Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Helen Levitt, Eliot Porter, Haas, and others using color for different purposes.^*29 Haas’s distinction within this history is not that he was “first.” Where Penn developed controlled color compositions for Vogue and Levitt brought color into everyday street life, Haas retained the mobility of magazine reportage while making color and time a single subject through slow shutter speeds, reflections, and panning.The National Gallery of Australia’s New American Colour Photography sets out the wider background: color remained tied to commercial culture for decades, while new photography emerged from the visual environment of everyday snapshots, television, film, and illustrated magazines.^*27 Reading Haas backward from the later canon leaves only the rank of “pioneer before New Color.” His 1950s work, however, spread across large Life features, film sets, advertising and corporate commissions, slide projection, and other media rather than moving directly from street color to large fine-art prints. That is precisely why he fits awkwardly into later definitions of “fine-art photography,” and that awkwardness itself helps explain which institutions color photography had to pass through before being accepted as art.