Ernst Haas, Leica and Me

This article will serve the dual purposes of explaining how I came to use Leicas, but more importantly, to remind us of the centenary of Ernst Haas’s birth on 2 March 2021, and why we should be interested.

When I opened a  copy of his landmark book, The Creation, published in 1971, my jaw dropped involuntarily, and it stayed that way as I perused it. Of course, I bought it. Seeing those photographs that Ernst Haas took with Leicas, and the photo on the rear cover fold by Gigi Minke of him holding a Leicaflex SL with 400/6.8 Telyt slip- grip lens, I knew that eventually, I would trade my Nikon kit for Leicaflexes and their lenses. After finishing college, doing two years in the Peace Corps and a year of grad school, I finally bought my first Leicaflex SL and 180/3.4 Apo-Telyt lens. I started filling out my lens collection after I entered Naval Officer Candidate School. Eventually,  I  carried two or three reflex cameras and various lenses from 21mm     to 400 mm focal lengths. The kit changed with newer camera models and some upgrades in lenses for over thirty years.

Now to move on to Ernst Haas, in my mind, a singular Genius of Seeing, and, for all intents and purposes, the inventor of small format color photography as we know it today.

Haas grew up in Vienna, Austria and experienced the aftermath of World  War  I  (WW1), the Great Depression and rise of Fascist and National Socialist politics, and World War II (WW2) and its aftermath. With some Jewish ancestry and having stayed in Austria throughout the Hitler years, his education, world view, and creative development were heavily influenced by all that happened during those years. He was well acquainted with the changes in the visual arts that erupted after World War I as Cubism, Favism, Dada, and all of the European abstractionist movements, to Surrealism. He made his first abstract photographs before the end  of WW2. While teaching photography after the end of  WW2  at an American Red Cross post, he realized a link between poetry and photography and also made the connection between photography and Surrealism from looking at photographs by Edward Weston in the post library.

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After WW2, Haas acquired a Rollieflex camera, and his reputation took off with his documentation of returning Austrian prisoners of war, published in Heute and LIFE magazines in 1949. He joined Magnum at Robert Capa’s invitation. In close concert with and encouraged by Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and Werner Bischof, he continued developing his own photographic vision and started using Leicas.

His first trip to the USA was in 1951 on assignment with Magnum and resulted in his being appointed vice-president of Magnum’s American operations. Up to this point, most of his work was black-and-white (B&W), although there is some evidence he experimented with color film before coming to the USA. He continued to  use B&W well into his career in  the USA for portraits, films, essays, advertising, and other projects

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California 1978

Sometime shortly after arriving in the USA and basing himself in New York City (NYC), he started experimenting with Kodachrome I, an ISO 8 film, in his Leicas. This is where and when he created a new direction in the History of Photography.

As nascent artists throughout the 20th Century had been inspired to discover new creative directions in the skyscraper canyons, the qualities of light, movement, juxtapositions, and other visual stimuli in NYC, so too did Haas with his Kodachrome filled Leicas. In two years, in 1953, LIFE published its first-ever color photo essays, “Images of a Magic City" (New York) in two issues, that reset how generations of amateur and professional photographers would think about color photography and fine art. LIFE would follow with another double essay on Motion, and several other essays on  Paris, Venice,  and many others. Other magazines published more essays and freelance work.

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Western Skies Motel, Albuquerque, New Mexico 1977

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Tobago Wave, Caribbean 1968

Along with Eliot Porter for scenic and nature photography, Haas taught photographers how to see artistically and produce images that heretofore had been the realm of painters. Color photography before Haas had been pretty much relegated to snap shooting, fashion, and National Geographic-type reportage. The manner in which Haas visualized his subjects, used the film frame, and manipulated Kodachrome created new standards of what was possible in photographic art. He redefined what it meant To See. Edward Steichen recognized Haas’s break-through photography as Fine Art and gave him the Museum of Modern Art’s first-ever solo color photography exhibition in 1962.

Haas’ creative contemporaries in NYC were the “New York School” of painters, sculptors, poets, and playwrights, and another “New York School” of photographers, who mostly produced B&W social reportage. Haas understood the European and  Abstract  Expressionist arts and, using color, went in a very different direction from those photographers. He brought all of those ways of thinking and seeing into his photography and made them his own: his famed film stills, Marlboro Man advertisements, essays, books, and, most of all, his personal work, best shown in Colour Correction, published by Steidl in 2011, sold out and reprinted in 2016. Color Correction is one of the most important photography monographs published in several decades. This book shows an aspect of his visualization not documented before. Haas’  eye could free-associate anything into something else. Using a slow shutter speed, he made a ballerina’s continuous pirouette into a vertical gamma-ray emission from a black hole’s event horizon. A costume jewelry display becomes a Hensonian puppet strangled by a golden snake. Suds going down a sink drain are no longer banal but become an intriguing abstract design.

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Reflection, Revolving Door, NY 1975

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Lights of New York City, NY 1972

My generation, the Post War Baby Boomers, were probably too young to have found inspiration in  Haas’  magazine essays of the 1950s. But The Creation was certainly one of our sources of inspiration to take up photography and to use the viewfinder in a modern way.

Haas continued to publish and garner awards, among which are the Hasselblad Award and the Leica Medal of Excellence in 1986, and his induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Louis in 2016, thirty years after his untimely death. His children, Alexander and Victoria Haas, manage the Ernst Haas Estate and his archive. They and several curators are working in that archive to document further how Haas used his inner eye and his impact on today’s visual artists.

I recommend Ernst Haas be inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame in 2021, not only for what he accomplished but also for Leica’s role in facilitating those accomplishments.