Andreas Feininger

Andreas Feininger – free-spirited offspring of a family of painters and photographers

Andreas Feininger was born on 27 December 1906 in Paris. The eldest son of the renowned painter Lyonel Feininger, he spent his youth in Germany, firstly in Berlin, then in Weimar and Dessau where his father taught at the Bauhaus. The love of art, namely photography, shaped the whole family: Andreas Feininger’s brothers were the musicologist Laurence Feininger and the photographer and painter Theodore Lux Feininger, and his half-sister Lore Feininger also worked as a portrait and architecture photographer. The free-spirited demeanor of his father carried over to Andreas who rejected all scholarly authority and was therefore required to leave his grammar school in 1922. This thwarted his intended study of the natural sciences, but he made a virtue out of necessity and enrolled in the Bauhaus where learned the craft of carpentry, together with Marcel Breuer. He later studied architecture at the Staatliche Bauschule in Zerbst.

Breakthrough as architectural photographer in Stockholm

Whilst studying, Andreas Feininger undertook his first photographic steps with his mother’s camera. Even though he worked for a short time in his learnt profession and designed a few memorable buildings, including the Andreas-Feininger-Haus, later named after him, in Berlin-Weißensee, he quickly recognised that his true career lay in photography. He began to see the world through the lens of his camera, capturing what he considered to be worthy of observation, and in 1929 presented six of his photographs in the Exhibition for Film and Photo in Stuttgart. When the Jewish-born Feininger lost his work permit in National Socialist Germany, he went to Paris and worked for a year for the famous architect Le Corbusier before emigrating to Stockholm in 1933 with his Swedish girlfriend Gertrud “Wysse” Hägg. He quickly established himself there as a sought-after photographer of architecture but was forced to emigrate to the USA at the start of the Second World War, where he met his parents.

The intellectual penetration of photography

Andreas Feininger was never happy with the existing possibilities but was continually puzzling out technical improvements which would enable him to get closer to his pictorial ideal. Some of his developments were later industrially produced by the company Liesegang. Feininger wasn’t someone who reflexively pressed the shutter release, but someone who intellectually grasped and penetrated his motifs. Because Feininger knew that the human eye viewed latitudinally, he composed his pictures accordingly so that the magazine editors, for whom he worked as freelance photo journalist, often had no choice but to print his pictures across two pages – a privilege that filled many of his famous colleagues with envy. Although Andreas Feininger was totally self-taught, he attained great importance with his sharp-sighted and profound theoretical textbook and is still classified as a benchmark by star photographers such as Peter Lindbergh.

Andreas Feininger died on 18 February 1999 in New York.