Heinz hajek halke biography of william hurt

Hajnal, Gabriella, · Hakkerup, N. L.

Slowly but surely the seas part, and the lost continents give up their treasures. Not that Heinz Hajek-Halke was as invisible as Atlantis—far from it. During the s and into the s, Hajek-Halke was as busy as any German photographer, and unlike so many artists of Jewish extraction, he neither emigrated nor was sent to a camp.

He managed to keep a low profile on the Swiss-German border, and after World War II began working again, albeit in a new key. As Heinz Hajek-Halke: Artist, Anarchist Steidl, makes abundantly clear, this photographer was a continent unto himself. The lack of significant attention paid him as an artist can be explained by three things: the nature of the times, the nature of the man, and the nature of photography.

In an essay by the redoubtable Klaus Honnef, who does a superb job of setting the scene, Hajek-Halke emerges as a talented artist who had the fortune and misfortune to be born into a time and place Berlin of photographic pioneers: Martin Munkacsi, Alfred Eisenstadt, John Heartfield, Laszlo Moholoy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, August Sander, and others were published in the same newspapers and magazines where his work appeared.

Hajek-Halke was a highly experimental editorial photographer, though not as elegant or sharp as Munkacsi. He was a visually sophisticated collagist, but he lacked the ideological fire of Heartfield or the surreal reach of Hannah Hoch. He had at least two successful photography jobs, but left them both. In the late s, he got into the habit of frequenting dives where criminals hung out, mostly to get pictures, according to Ruetz, and it was probably through those connections that he flirted with cocaine addiction and National Socialism.

Yet, as Hajek-Halke accurately observed later, the two dominant features of his character were his oppositional nature and his curiosity. With so many contemporary photographic artists exploring abstraction, the time is ideal to rediscover Atlantis. Ruetz promises that another volume, covering nearly thirty years, will follow, presumably also from Steidl.

It may not elevate Hajek-Halke to the level of the greats, but it will give a richer, and truer, picture of photography as the most experimental of modern arts. View Article Pages.