VALE WOLFGANG SIEVERS 1913-2007

摘要

Wolfgang Sievers died in August, a month before his 94th birthday and vibrant to the last. He was a great Australian photographer, certainly the equal of Max Dupain, but with a "Melbourne" sensibility. From a background of German persecution he brought an amalgam of respect for the working man's dignity and Teutonic perfection to his stylish and memorable compositions. Not for Wolfgang the hedonism of beach and nudes or the classical compositions favoured by Dupain. His work was infused with an ongoing sense of European Modernism. His father was an art historian specializing in architecture and Director of Cultural Affairs in the Weimar Government. Wolfgang was a student and then instructor at the Contempora School for Applied Arts in Berlin, an offshoot of the Bauhaus. In 1934 he went to Portugal to escape the Nazi regime and photographed extensively. He returned to Germany in 1936 and, despite being imprisoned and beaten by the Gestapo, studied and worked at the Contempora until graduation in 1938, meeting Mendelsohn and Steichen along the way.