1930s German Taste: A book of photos taken with a Rollei

     Walther Heering. Le Livre D’or du Rolleiflex. (1936) Paul Franck and Reinhold Heidecke teamed up in 1920 to produce optical stereo cameras. They used their experience to design and make the Rolleiflex, a twin-lens reflex camera that earned a well-deserved reputation for technical excellence and reliability. Its design was copied by several other makers, including Yashica: my father bought one of those at a Rexall drugstore in Edmonton, and eventually passed it on to me. I still have it. The technical problem with any medium or large format camera is to ensure corner to corner focus. Before computers enabled the design of lenses with complicated surfaces, lens makers had to rely on experience and skill. Plus a good dollop of intuition. Franck and Heidecke succeeded brilliantly.
     So in1935 Dr Walther Heering sent out a request to users of the Rollei to send in their best photos, and this PR book was the result. Published in German, English, and French, it includes an historical essay by Heering, a list of contributors and technical details of exposure and film, and 180 rotogravured plates. The printing quality is excellent. The photos themselves, not so much. Grouped by subject, they are technically very good: excellent exposure, development, and printing. The book is clearly aimed at photographers, both amateur and professional, people who took picture making seriously. This collection of “excellent pictures” was intended to inspire would-be photographers, to show the reader how to make pictures “in his or her own way” with a Rolleiflex.
     How well did Dr Heering succeed? If he intended to challenge photographers to extend their practice, he failed. If he intended to confirm them in their comfort zone, he succeeded. The photos tend to the sentimental, banal, pleasantly platitudinous. Yet this was the time of the photo-essay and reportage of LIFE and Picture Post. In the USA, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to record the effects of the Depression. Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Adams, Cartier Bresson, Man Ray and many others had shown what could be done with photography. They used the camera to extend seeing, to enlarge one’s visual understanding of the world.
     None of the images in this book prompt one to reconsider what one is looking at. They are nice pictures, presenting a world of nice people doing nice things. The selection holds to the notion that art should show beautiful and interesting things, not that art should make things look beautiful and interesting.
     As a collection of photos, average; as documentation of German taste in the 1930s, useful. **