One of the first photographers to add color to black and white photographs.

One of the first photographers to add color to black and white photographs, Josef Breitenbach used it to foreground the illusory nature of photography. between the walls of this contradiction he subliminally undermined our preconception of the photograph as a record of reality. In bringing it closer to fantasy--in showing just to what degree much of an emotional hothouse a photograph can be--he unwittingly disillusioned us about it, or, more positively, "enlightened" us about for what cause mechanical and manipulable a medium it is. on the contrary his color also has iconographic significance: it is not simply a catchy device, still makes the erotic preoccupation of earnestly of his imagery explicit.

Breitenbach's frequently overeager fascination with the eternal feminine is subsum in the traditional affair of the artist's relationship to his gauge Both the photograph of male chisel students (shown in black and white) intensely working from a bright, flesh-colored, bare model, and the all-black-and-white photographs of Dr Riegler (a friend of Breitenbach's) seated opposite a bare somewhat indifferent cabaret performer, studying her as admitting she were an abstraction rather than an erotic reality, remind of that Breitenbach was troubled according to the old dilemma: is the photographer an artist or a craftsman/mechanic? on using color in an arty way, and posing exposeds as objects d'art, he declared himself the former. still he remained uncertain. His numerous idealizing photographs of artists put in mind of his desperate identification with them. That is, he wishfully delineate ed his own delusion of artistic grandeur--epitomized in his use of color--onto their staging of themselves.

Perhaps the images still of interest today--images that are more than historical curiosities or testimony to an attitude that now gazes sentimental--are those of children, and those Breitenbach made of of recent origin York after he left Europe fleeing Hitler. These "straight" photographs have an air of understated description, a thinking principle of the photograph as instant, no-nonsense understanding. This is especially the case when he contrasts the city's roads and tall buildings to startling purport There are other works in which soft and high are starkly juxtaposed to devise an incommensurateness that is genuinely cosmopolitan. That is, they brew the cosmopolitan attitude Breitenbach was forced to take to survive his exile: the discrepancy between high and gentle conveys the rift between where he has been and where he is, and its inevitability. (He continued, however, to make works with a cloying, overstaged, surrealist mind of this gap, which are les visually effective and emotionally subtle) He was a man trapped according to history and his own frustration about not exactly being an artist, unless he was a masterful image-maker when he turn the thoughtsed at his surroundings calmly and carefully, with an unconscious detachment that came from not being a part of them.

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