Photographer Spotlight: Ernst Haas

Graffiti Abstract #7. Longmont, Colorado, 2013

Ernst Haas, Austrian born to artistic parents, voted by Popular Photography in 1958 as one of the top ten photographers in the world, former president of the famous Magnum Photos cooperative…a photojournalist and pioneer of color photography as both documentation and art. If you haven’t heard of him, you should have. I’ll give you some “Haas Homework” at the end of this entry so you can become more familiar with him.

His work has appeared in Life, Vogue, and in countless other magazines and exhibitions worldwide, and his list of awards is dern near endless. His book, The Creation (1971), was a huge seller and perhaps his best known publication. (Highly recommended for your photography library. Reprints are available on Amazon for a very reasonable price–original editions, though, will cost you a pickle penny!)

Funny story: he apparently traded a 10 kilo block of butter–or some such dairy product–for his first camera, a bulky Rolleiflex. A good portion of his huge body of work, though, was done with a small, Leica 35mm rangefinder and Kodachrome transparency film.

What I find interesting about Ernst Haas’ legacy is that he helped legitimize color photography as an art form. He got serious about using color in the early 1950s and his work was good enough that he managed to change a number of the more stuffy and traditional minds among the museum and gallery set. Up until then, you see, photography was not really taken seriously as “art” unless it was done in black and white, a la Adams, Edward and Imogen. Although now you’ll find plenty of color photography in museums and galleries, there still exists today a subtle undercurrent (mostly among the diehard traditionalists, ’tis true) that black and white work is more “serious” than color photography. For the record: not true. And Haas was one of the first to prove it.

For your “Haas homework”, check out the Ernst Haas Estate website here. A look through his galleries will prove both inspirational, humbling, and educational.