Herbert List (7 October 1903 – 4 April 1975) was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, includingVogue,Harper's Bazaar, andLife, and was associated withMagnum Photos. His austere, classically posedblack-and-white compositions, particularly hishomoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography.
Herbert List was born on 7 October 1903 to a prosperous business family inHamburg, the son of Luise and Felix List.[1] He attended theJohanneum Gymnasium, and afterwards studied literature 1921–23 at theUniversity of Heidelberg. While still a student he becameapprenticed in the family company, Landfried Coffee.[2] In 1923, after two years in Heidelberg learning about the coffee trade and attending lectures at the university on Greek art and literature, List traveled for the family business Kaffee-Import Firma List & Heineken, Hamburg.[3] Between 1925 and 1928 he visited plantations and contacts inGuatemala,Costa Rica,San Salvador,Brazil (where he stayed for six months) andSan Francisco. During this time he began taking photographs.
In 1929 he metAndreas Feininger who inspired his greater interest in photography and gave him aRolleiflex camera. From 1930 he began takingportraits of friends and shootingstill life; was influenced by theBauhaus and artists of thesurrealist movements,Man Ray,Giorgio De Chirico andMax Ernst; and created a surrealist photograph titledMetaphysique in a style he calledfotografia metafisica in homage to De Chirico, his most important influence during this period.[2]
List used male models, draped fabric, masks and double-exposures to depict dream states and fantastic imagery. He has explained that his photos were "composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances."[4][5]
While there are surface similarities to Nazi imagery of the athletic male body—that ofLeni Riefenstahl for example—unlike them, List's pictures of friends are portraits as much as they are nudes, nor did List endorse Nazi ideas, nor did his work influenceNational Socialist photography. He never published his male nudes in his own lifetime, and kept them hidden in his mother's house in a sack he called his 'poison bag'.[6] He was however influenced in his depiction of romantic paganism by theJugendbewegung youth and physical health movement, though he did not join any of its associations, and some of the ideals of theJugendbewegung were co-opted by the Nazis (though they later denounced the movement) and influenced their idealisingRomantic realism.[7] List in his own notes uses a pun—"Das Objektiv ist nicht objectiv,"—to emphasise his creative, non-realist, application of photography: "The lens is not objective. Otherwise photography would be useless as an artistic medium."[8]
In 1936, in response to the danger of Gestapo attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, List left Germany for Paris, where he metGeorge Hoyningen-Huene with whom he travelled to Greece, deciding then to become a photographer.[2] During 1937 he worked in a studio in London and held his first one-man show atGalerie du Chasseur d'Images in Paris in a show reviewed by G. Brunon Guardia forl'Intransigeant;
This photographer, having perfected a method based on the geometric laws of composition and the interplay of contrasts, applies to it all a Germanic rigour. The choice of his subjects, the pose of the model, the placement of the object, deliberately artificial, contribute to the coldness of the results. But we are in front of work that is a superb demonstration. The staging is always remarkable in itself except for the facile Hoffmannesque use of wax dolls and masks, but this distant monument which is really part of a bicycle placed in the foreground, or these shells taken at point-blank range on sand in front of a mirror that reflects the dunes, are worth stopping for. Even in the less commendable equivocation of certain nudes, Herbert List shows himself to be an ingenious director, and a faithful interpreter. There is therefore, for gifted amateurs and for many professionals, much to draw from these excellent lessons, even if it means returning later to more soulful expressions.[9]
Hoyningen-Huene referred him toHarper's Bazaar magazine, and 1936–39 he worked forArts et Metiers Graphiques,Verve,Vogue,Photographie,Life and lesser publications includingLa Belle France.[10] List was unsatisfied withfashion photography. He turned back to still life imagery, continuing in hisfotografia metafisica style.
From 1937 to 1939 List traveled in Greece and took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and the landscape for his bookLicht über Hellas. In the meantime he supported himself with work for magazinesNeue Linie,Die Dame and for the press from 1940 to 1943, and with portraits which he continued to make until 1950.[2] In List's work the revolutionary tactics of surrealist art and a metaphysical staging of irony and reverie had been honed in on the fashion industry that relied on illusion and spectacle which after World War II returned to a classical fixation on ruins, broken male statuary and antiquity.[11]
In 1941, during World War II, he was forced to return to Germany; but because one of his grandparents was Jewish[12] he was not allowed to publish or work professionally. In 1944 he was drafted into the German military, despite being of partly Jewish ancestry. He served in Norway as a map designer.[3] A trip to Paris allowed him to take portraits ofPicasso,Jean Cocteau,Christian Bérard,Georges Braque,Jean Arp,Joan Miró, and others.
After the war, he photographed the ruins ofMunich where he continued to live until 1960, working mainly for the Swiss magazineDu, with freelance photo essays forHeute,Epoca,Look,Harper's Bazaar,Flair, andPicture Post. He was made art editor ofHeute magazine, published by theAllied occupying forces, in 1948.
In 1951, List metRobert Capa, who invited him to work as a contributor toMagnum, but he rarely accepted assignments.[13][4] For the next decade he produced copious work in Italy. During this time he also started using a35 mm film camera and atelephoto lens.[citation needed] He was influenced by his Magnum colleagueHenri Cartier-Bresson as well as theItalian neorealist film movement.[citation needed] In the 1950s he also shot portraits ofMarino Marini,Paul Bowles,W. H. Auden, andMarlene Dietrich in 1960. Over the period 1949–62 he visited Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
List's 1950 picture of a woman, her black dress spread about her, reclining at a respectable distance from an elderly man reading, with one leg of his trousers rolled above his socks and garter, both enjoying the spring sunshine on the front steps of theGlyptothek in Munich, was selected by curatorEdward Steichen for the world-touringMuseum of Modern Art exhibitionThe Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors.[14]
In 1964 List was awarded theDavid Octavius Hill Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner.
List is best known for his bookJunge Männer (1988) which contains more than seventy images of young men lounging in the sun, wrestling and innocently regarding the camera lens.[15][16] It is introduced byStephen Spender in whose autobiographical novelThe Temple, written in 1929 but not published until 1988,[17] List is fictionalised as Joachim Lenz.[18][19]
List gave up photography in the early 1960s to concentrate on his collection of Italian Old Master Drawings.[20]
List died in Munich on 4 April 1975,[21] and his archive was absorbed in the Ratjen collection which was later acquired by theNational Gallery in Washington.[22]
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