Umbo

The Bauhaus Years

Born Otto Maximilian Umbehr, Umbo studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1923 and took Johannes Itten’s preliminary course. Bauhaus Kooperation’s biography confirms his study with Itten and his move to Berlin after leaving the school.^*3 The chronology matters: describing Umbo as a graduate of a “Bauhaus photography department” would be inaccurate. According to the Bauhaus-Archiv, photography was not a central part of the curriculum in the early 1920s, and formal, independent instruction in photography began only in 1929 under Walter Peterhans.^*5 What Umbo encountered was Itten’s compositional teaching, which combined color, form, rhythm, and intuition, along with a workshop culture crossing architecture, theater, and design. This differed in character from specialized training in photographic technique.

Paul Citroen

After moving to Berlin, Umbo moved through jobs connected to art and film and, around 1926, opened a photography studio at the suggestion of his friend Paul Citroen. The Berlinische Galerie identifies close-up portraits of actors, artists, and bohemians as a central part of this early work and describes Berlin melancholy as a recurring subject in his urban photographs.^*2 In Paul Citroen he moves so close that the ear and jaw are cropped, making pores and wrinkles part of the image’s structure. The museum connects such close framing to the formation of the “New Woman” and to new forms of expressive portraiture.^*1 In the MFAH photograph Johannes Itten, he likewise rejects a conventional bust portrait of his former teacher, using light and cropping to turn facial expression itself into the image.^*18

The Met traces Umbo’s passage from Itten’s preliminary course to Berlin, work around Walter Ruttmann’s film production, and his subsequent turn to photography as the background to Night in a Small Town.^*23 MoMA’s holdings of Mystery of the Street, View of Berlin’s Department Store Karstadt, and Stairs II show how even within a high-angle view, the structure of the image changes according to street, commercial architecture, or staircase.^*24 The elevated viewpoint compressed traffic, signs, buildings, and the movement of people—elements difficult to grasp simultaneously from eye level—into a single plane. The modern city became legible as a structure of relationships and speed, with individual buildings absorbed into a larger pattern of movement.

High Angles and Shadows

In The Mystery of the Street, a small figure and a long shadow appear on a street seen from an upper floor, with almost no building or horizon visible. MoMA presents the photograph as a key example of how height and shadow could turn an ordinary street into an enigmatic space.^*8 MoMA’s Object:Photo essay analyzes Umbo’s work as a combination of expressive tendencies associated with Itten and Constructivist strategies of composition.^*9 In Karstadt, the department-store sign, architecture, and passersby are fragmented by a steep angle, while the DEPHOT stamp on the print preserves a direct trace of the image’s press circulation.^*10 The capacity of the camera to leave ordinary human eye level was fundamental to Umbo’s method. Photographing from above, from below, or at extreme proximity made the speed and instability of metropolitan experience register visually before any explanatory text was read.

Night Photography and Film

Umbo also worked around Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, bringing still photography into proximity with cinematic perceptions of the city. The Met’s Night in a Small Town, made in 1928 from an elevated position, organizes darkness and artificial light boldly; the museum discusses the photograph through Umbo’s Bauhaus experience, connection to Ruttmann, and Expressionist sensibility.^*11 In Rut, a body is cropped at a dramatic angle and at close range, making face and posture appear as a moment of movement.^*12 SFMOMA’s holdings of portraits, urban photographs, and photomontages likewise show that Umbo did not assign a fixed technique to a fixed subject; he repeatedly changed the camera’s position.^*14 New Vision therefore operated less as a single recognizable look than as a habit of reconsidering where the camera should see from each time.

DEPHOT

In 1928 Umbo joined Simon Guttmann and others in founding the photo agency DEPHOT. MoMA’s Object:Photo explains that DEPHOT emphasized photographers’ credits, thematic sequences, and edited photo essays, and that the agency had a major influence on the development of modern photojournalism.^*7 MoMA’s artist page likewise places magazine and agency work at the center of Umbo’s Berlin years.^*6 In the National Gallery of Art’s Der rasende Reporter, a face, camera, and mechanical elements suggestive of a typewriter are compressed into a single figure, turning the profession of the reporter itself into a body made of speed and media technology.^*13 Illustrated magazines filled with photographs required each image to catch a reader’s attention and lead into the next. View of Berlin’s Department Store Karstadt confirms both the steep downward view of the store and the date 1929.^*25 A viewpoint devised to make the scale and flow of the new city legible also suited the speed with which a magazine page was read.

The Berlinische Galerie treats the early portrait of Paul Citroen as part of Umbo’s search for a new experience of seeing through photography.^*21 The Met’s Bauhaus photography exhibition places Umbo among experiments in high-angle views, night photography, architecture, and portraiture that coexisted within and around the school even before it established a formal photography class.^*22 Once the work entered DEPHOT, those viewpoints moved from the format of single photographs contemplated in exhibitions into spreads and sequences of multiple images. Readers did not need to know the theory of New Vision to encounter its high viewpoints, close framing, and diagonals repeatedly while reading news stories about cities and people.

Understanding DEPHOT simply as a distribution outlet for Umbo’s individual photographs misses the larger change. Herbert Molderings’s foundational study reconstructs Umbo along a path “from the Bauhaus to photojournalism,” placing the agency and illustrated press at the center of his production history.^*27 In another study Molderings calls DEPHOT a “school of modern photo-reportage” between 1928 and 1933 and examines how Weimar press photography emerged not from novel angles alone but from a chain linking photography, editing, captions, page design, and agency distribution.^*28

Photography historian Patrick Rössler has studied magazines such as Das illustrierte Blatt around 1928 and argues that the popular illustrated press played a larger role in establishing modern photography than earlier histories often acknowledged.^*29 Daniel H. Magilow likewise analyzes the Weimar photo essay as an important medium between the single photograph and the photobook, tracing how editors used image sequence and page design to teach readers a “new way of seeing.”^*30 Umbo’s high and close viewpoints became widely visible because a magazine market demanded large quantities of new photography and agencies connected photography to editing and distribution. Detached from the printed page, his unusual angles lose part of the explanation for why they penetrated the visual culture of the period so deeply.

《Film und Foto》

Umbo also exhibited in the international 1929 Film und Foto exhibition and gained institutional recognition as a representative photographer of New Vision. An LFI retrospective essay follows the simultaneous roles of Berlin magazine culture, DEPHOT, and avant-garde exhibitions in his career.^*16 The prometheus image archive likewise presents Umbo as a key figure in new Weimar portraiture and urban photography and makes multiple examples of his close-ups, high-angle views, and photomontages available.^*17 Bauhaus Dessau’s teaching materials on the history of photography stress that Bauhaus photography never formed a single unified style and identify Umbo as an important practitioner of expressive close-up portraiture and reportage.^*20 Before museum “experimental photography” and newspaper “press photography” became fully separate categories, Umbo made the same formal devices function in both.

The Nazi Period

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, DEPHOT was dissolved and Umbo returned to freelance work. Deutsche Biographie records that he continued press and advertising assignments through the later 1930s and wartime years and contributed between 1940 and 1943 to Signal, a propaganda magazine produced for the Wehrmacht.^*4 Visual techniques that had been avant-garde in the Weimar period did not disappear automatically with regime change; they could continue as professional skills within the media industries of a different political system. There is no basis for treating Umbo as a central photographer of Nazi propaganda, but his work for Signal makes clear that New Vision’s formal devices cannot automatically be equated with a single political use.

Reassessment

Umbo’s studio and most of his negatives were destroyed in the 1943 bombing of Berlin. The Berlinische Galerie notes that after moving to Hanover he continued to make portraits, photograms, and reportage, but his work remained largely forgotten until reassessment around his 1979 solo exhibition.^*2 What is now known of his 1920s work has been reconstructed from vintage prints, published magazine pages, later prints, and a dispersed estate. Most of an archive said to have contained roughly sixty thousand negatives was lost. The Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung documents its support for the acquisition of the estate in 2016 and its division among the Berlinische Galerie, Sprengel Museum Hannover, and Bauhaus Dessau.^*15 The Arp Museum likewise places works from its collection at the intersection of New Vision and press photography.^*19 This state of the archive ties Umbo’s reception directly to questions of preservation. The full extent to which his photography crossed the avant-garde and the press becomes visible only by comparing museum prints with surviving magazines and traces of agency circulation.

The joint acquisition of the estate in 2016 by the Berlinische Galerie, Sprengel Museum Hannover, and Bauhaus Dessau created a research structure in which prints, negatives, and documents held by several institutions can be compared.^*15 Sprengel Museum treats the Umbo estate as one of the research foundations of its photography and media department and continues to reassess the material.^*26 For a photographer whose negatives were largely destroyed, distinctions among vintage prints, magazine reproductions, agency materials, and later prints directly affect the dating and understanding of the work’s uses. Reassessment therefore concerns more than the restoration of reputation; it becomes an archival problem of which images survived, in what form, and from which media photographic history can be reconstructed.