COLOGNE.- In a double presentation, the Museum Ludwig is showing newly acquired photographs by Alfred Ehrhardt (1901–1984) in dialogue with photographs by Elfriede Stegemeyer (1908–1988). Although the two photographers never met, they shared an interest in the subject matter of water, beaches, and sand for several years.

Alfred Ehrhardt studied painting with masters such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1928–29. Due to his modernist approach to art, he was dismissed from his teaching job at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg by the Nazis in 1933. Using a camera, he searched for structures and abstract forms in the sand dunes of the Curonian Spit and in the tidal flats of northern Germany, and discovered the sublime in details—his form of inner emigration. He was always intent on capturing the impact of Urkräfte, primordial forces, far away from civilization, as well as "the essential." Summing up his work in 1937, he wrote, "I wanted to convey the organic whole through one detail, which is only possible if with your choice of the detail you overcome the statics of outward appearance and grasp the dynamism of the object in terms of light and angle, making the whole come alive although you are only showing a detail. In photography there is nothing wrong about mentioning design. However, it is not a matter of optical gimmicks and tricks. Much more, it’s a fundamentally new way seeing that reveals to us the essential elements of things." Erhardt published his works in photography books such as Die Kurische Nehrung (The Curonian Spit, 1934), Das Watt (The Tidelands, 1937), and, later, Wattenmeer: Formen und Strukturen (Mudflats: Forms and Structures, 1967). Alongside his pictures taken outdoors, he created enlargements of seashells and snail shells in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit, and later he also made award-winning avant-garde films such as Tanz der Muscheln (Dance of the Seashells), which was released in 1959.

Elfriede Stegemeyer also began her work as an artist in a different genre before turning to photography in 1932. She was closely associated with the artist group of the Cologne Progressives and Dadaists, going one step further: she used photographs that she had taken of Sylt, Ibiza—where she visited artist Raoul Hausmann—and Sicily in her collages and overpainted them. In 1981 she wrote to art historian Uli Bohnen, "I am much too dedicated to my work to be able to put a label on it, but if I muse about it, I would classify it as ‘nature loving’ because I see all living things as being in danger, and I think that I sometimes approached the essence of things in my work. I allow my ‘thing’ to grow on its own as much as possible, what I do to that end is observe, investigate, isolate, connect—even at the risk of drawing false conclusions. If we don’t take risks ourselves, we cannot extract the vividness. That is why I risk making the following observation: I do not believe that abstraction alone leads to the goal. Structure per se is not an abstraction, but structure encompasses it and excludes it. I believe that all doctrines should be avoided; they impede the natural flow." Much of Stegemeyer’s oeuvre was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.

Both Elfriede Stegemeyer and Alfred Ehrhardt replaced the traditional seascape—that is, the maritime genre—with the visual experience of seeing natural structures. Both began using the camera during the Nazi era, as the medium was less in the focus of Nazi censorship and destruction. They both turned to nature in their pictures, and away from human beings, choosing details that captured natural structures in an abstract way. Although Stegemeyer and Ehrhardt both belonged to the photographic avant-garde, it took a long time for them to be truly discovered.

All photographs in the presentation are new acquisitions of the Photography Collection at the Museum Ludwig. Alfred Ehrhardt’s works are part of a generous donation from the Bartenbach family, and Elfriede Stegemeyer’s works were recently acquired from the estate of Cologne gallerist Gerd Sander, who was influential in making Stegemeyer’s work better known. This exhibition demonstrates once again that modernist photography has yet to be fully explored.