Heinrich Kühn. The Perfect Photograph

Astrid Mahler, Monika Faber

Along with Alfred Stieglitz and other friends, Kühn made the stylized photograph an element of the Gesamtkunstwerk aspired to by the Secessionists. The most important tool for this was an offset process he had perfected, which due to the free choice of paper and pigment made the picture look more like a print than a conventional photograph. This allowed him to deliberately alter the brightness contrasts to fit his notion of the image and dissolve the sharpness of the image, rejected as “non-artistic,” at his own convenience. Around 1910, Kühn reduced the romantic cosmos of “Pictorialism” to the point where his compositions became almost abstract and exhibited a sense of timelessness and balance.