Landshoff
Hermann Landshoff (1905-1986), German photographer, son of a renowned musicologist. He studied drawing to become a cartoonist, but in that the creative laboratory of the Bauhaus he encountered photography.
The rise to power of National Socialism, which closed the school and promulgated racial laws, forced him to emigrate to Paris in 1933, where he worked for the French edition of Vogue and Fémina.
In 1941 he reached New York and continued to work in the world of fashion. In New York he published his photos on Vogue and, in the post-war period, on Junior, Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. His style, which impressed and influenced the young Richard Avedon, had a fresh, dynamic vision. Indeed, his photography had nothing to do with traditional fashion photography, which at that time was rather static.
Landshoff preferred to work on external sets and often asks models to move on skates, to jump as if in a moment of happiness, or to ride a bicycle in front of his camera.
Landshoff also made a good name for himself as an architectural and portrait photographer. Moreover, he made a series of portraits of famous photographers, among whom Weegee, Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon, and of personalities such as Einstein and Oppenheimer.
In 2002 the Fashion Institute of Technology of New York dedicated him a big solo exhibition of his most important black-and-white works of the 1940s and 1950s.
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