PAUL WOLFF, DOCTOR
This is the last of three articles based upon materials shared by Ashley Wolff, Paul Wolff ’s granddaughter. Here, starting with images from Ashley, we will examine what is likely the totality of pictures involving Paul Wolff and doctors. There are only a very few such, and those few are surprisingly perfunctory. We will look at why this might be the case, and what this likely tells us about Wolff as a person.
Years ago, when this author started working on the bibliography of Leica pioneer Paul Wolff and then gradually encountered the related biographical data, he came face to face with the story of Wolff being first a physician (with an avocation of photography) and then later a famous photographer. And not just a famous photographer, but also a person who kept the title “Doktor” even though he had ceased practicing as one at the end of WWI. For Germans, “Doktor” as an honorific refers to the holder of a Ph.D. or an honorary degree, not usually a medical doctor (“Arzt”); however, in Wolff ’s time, most medical doctors wrote theses, as also did Wolff. Being a Doktor in Germany has always entitled one to great respect. Likely Wolff kept the “Dr.” because of his academic doctorate and not because of the M.D., but of course they were linked. And quite possibly also he chose “Dr. Paul Wolff ” to distinguish himself as a photographer from his contemporary competitor, “Paul Wolff (Dresden)”.
Image ca 1928 of Paul Wolff at the typewriter
Image of Paul Wolff as doctor reading x-rays. Undated. Provided by Thomas Sommer.
Yet confusion exists as to Wolff ’s appellation. For example, years ago the author encountered one historian who, from the ambiguity of available information, doubted that Wolff was indeed a medical doctor, but guessed he was rather a dentist! To that historian, it seemed as though Wolff had something to hide about his title. (This author definitely thinks the historian had grasped a basic psychological truth about Wolff without having put his finger on it, vide infra.) Clearly, being known as “Dr.” was important to Wolff as a signifier, but he simultaneously downplayed his medical career, which then received minimal attention in the historical record. In a 1935 autobiographical sketch (in Meister der Kamera erzählen, Wilhelm Schöppe, editor),(1) Wolff passes over it in a few sentences, saying that while it was easy enough for him to become a doctor, it was too difficult to do this in Frankfurt after the War, because attempts to establish a practice were thwarted by his lack of money during the 1920s hyperinflation. Wolff could only have had about six months of service in Alsace as a doctor before the War; most of his actual medical practice was military. Like many military veterans, Wolff states he actively chose not to pass on details of what had happened around him as a regimental doctor. (“I don’t relish talking about the war. I could report some ghastly things…”) [from Koetzle].(2) In fact, he relates (in Schöppe) that after the war he destroyed whatever military photographs he had made. It may be instructive here to note that one of the few major subjects on which Wolff never published photographs was the military; another was nudes.(3) One can potentially add doctors to this list, because there are so few such published images.
During the early 1920s in Frankfurt, after Wolff gave up trying to find employment as a physician, he struggled and was likely repeatedly humiliated attempting to make his avocation, photography, into his profession,(4) likely, in part, because he was not credentialed as such. This added insult to injury. As a further potential conflict, per Wolff ’s unpublished autobiography quoted by Koetzle,(5) Wolff ’s father had earlier urged him to study medicine and not to devote himself to photography: “…because my father refused to view the profession of photographer as class-appropriate under any circumstances, indeed he described it as a whim”. Circumstantial evidence: one almost never hears about Wolff as physician. He short-circuits the outside observer’s potential empathy here by not really discussing the emotional dimensions of having been forced to switch professions, although he implies that there was difficulty. Wolff apparently did not discuss any feelings about this in his autobiography either, and only gives the minimal facts of what had happened when he could not afford to open a medical practice.(6) However, the little we do know about Wolff the doctor is negatively tinged, and one could surmise that Wolff probably had at least ambivalent, if not painfully depressive or angry feelings about his medical career and how it played out. He could have also internalized his father’s value judgments about the two professions and felt defensive about what he finally chose to do. In essence, the Wolff we know may have tried to minimize or banish such feelings by, for the most part, avoiding this particular subject in his work. Wolff nonetheless kept his socially valuable “Doktor” signifier, setting up possible cognitive dissonance when this title was used, or when he actually did photograph doctors. How he handled his ambivalence in his few doctor pictures may give us a subtle entrée into understanding how his psyche operated on an emotional level.
Image from 1934 Meine Erfarhrungen mit der Leica. Ein historischer Querschnitt aus fast 10 Jahren Leica-Photographie, Frankfurt am Main, H. Bechhold Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1934, p. 185 & 188.
Let us pause for a moment and actually empathize with all that Paul Wolff had gone through in just the few years of his early maturity: he had been a newly-minted regimental doctor in a gruesome war; he was summarily expelled from his beloved Alsace; he was not able to work and support his young family as a doctor in Germany due the concurrent inflation; and he had to struggle to become the renowned photographer he only later became. This series of events must have had significant psychological impact upon him. It would not be unreasonable to consider Wolff ’s photographic vision — his lively Leica images, so well-conceived and made — as being a real emotional relief for him: the images he published were almost always happy ones based on a playful view of their reality; he was in control of what he did and loved doing it; and people really liked his work and paid him large sums of money for it. So, perhaps Wolff ’s immersion in his business career and in his unique photographic vision provided a potent antidote to counteract stress and depression. Think Roger’s and Hammerstein’s “Happy Talk” from South Pacific as a musical reference; substitute “Happy Snaps”.
While there is presently basic evidence of Wolff ’s medical bona fides (such as the date of his medical examination, the nature of Wolff ’s thesis, and the name of his thesis advisor), the author wishes to present images that were received from Wolff ’s granddaughter Ashley that pertain directly or indi- rectly to Wolff the doctor. All of these are rarities. In over 20 years of research, the author has not ever seen another image of Wolff as an actual practicing doctor, and here first is a group portrait of Dr. Wolff, his staff nurses, and apparently military patients under his care on a hospital ward. From what Dr. Wolff has said elsewhere, this may be the hospital for POWs that he worked at in Metz in 1914 before being sent to the Eastern Front. The reverse of this image has stamped upon it only the name and address of its likely photographer but no date. Wolff is near the center dressed in his hospital whites and necktie, just behind two gents seated on the floor. One assumes that any of the men not wearing military caps or holding canes are possibly hospital orderlies or attendants.
This semi-formal portrait of him in a hospital setting gives a certain tangibility and physicality to his medical role that had otherwise been lacking in the historical narrative. There is also, in a documentary sense, a feeling of pathos and authenticity to this image, with almost everyone making eye contact with the camera.
A second set of “medical” images supplied by Ashley Wolff, in contrast, derive from a small undated (likely ca 1928) folded flyer or brochure. This appeared initially to be also something having to do with Paul Wolff ’s role as a doctor. Only upon reading the text, however, one discovers that this flyer was clearly meant for advertising purposes and, as such, its images were staged. In fact, it is likely that the brochure was not Wolff ’s own idea, but rather an assignment dictated by the advertiser.(7) Here Wolff used himself as well as Tritschler (in the image with the x-ray) as the model; at that date, he often used his family, his associates, or himself in such a manner, likely to save money. Tritschler, now working with Wolff as an assistant, could have alternated with Wolff taking the pictures, which from the images’ shape, are likely 9 x 12 cm images, not Leica pictures. In any case, Thomas Sommer says these pictures are not in his Archiv.
From an undated (ca 1928) folded flyer / brochure from Wanderer-Werke A.-G., Schönau-Chemnitz. The flyer also contains the name Hermann, which may represent the graphic artist involved.
The idea in the flyer was to convey to medical doctors the usefulness of a relatively new device — the portable typewriter. The text in the flyer focuses at length on how convenient and rapid it would be for the “Modern Doctor” to be able to type up, by him- or herself, the medical notes or other necessary paperwork following an appointment with a patient. Such notes were of course a medical document, but also were more than occasionally needed for legal, insurance, or other purposes. And with the portable typewriter, one could easily type such notes (in duplicate or triplicate if needed) without much training and did not require a large, expensive typewriter with a special desk or need a hired typist. So goes the text.
Wolff ‘s modus operandi very often involved him staging his images to make them have some enhanced sense of reality – the scene’s “quintessence”, as Wolff would later define it. Such an essence was almost always a happy one. Even in his best images, where we become almost personally involved in the moment with the people being depicted, Wolff is working as deus ex machina, controlling how we see the image and feel about it. The little doctor flyer is no exception. The author of this article on Wolff is also both a physician and a photographer, and found himself at first gently bemused with these flyer images, easily falling into the reaction of: “Well, well, what do we have here? Here is another rare picture of Paul Wolff as a doctor!” He felt compelled to go along with Wolff ’s playful doctor fantasy in the flyer because the images are so convincingly well done. It took reading the text to establish the actual circumstances: viz. that Wolff here is not being depicted as himself professionally at all, but is actually working on assignment, on an advertisement for a typewriter for doctors. He is presenting a quintessential image of a doctor in his office, typing. That is his goal here, expertly done. The flyers images are simply an effective commercial ad which feels quite real and true-to-life even though it has nothing to do with “Paul Wolff, Doktor” really at all. Rather, this is play-acting.
For the author, however, this flyer could well be taken as prima facie evidence of how Wolff handled emotional issues arising in his work: by replacing reality with a plausibly-real yet idealizing construct, and play-acting with us in the way that usually makes his photography so captivating. Wolff ’s photo reality is often like Walt Disney’s movie reality – too distilled and perfect to be “really” real, but at the same time superficially persuasive and almost always enjoyable. We happily go along for the ride. But in this flyer, we are dealing not with a factory worker, a coal miner, or a holiday-goer on the beach, but with a doctor, of Wolff ’s learned profession, which medical career appears to have raised ambivalent, even uncomfortable memories for him. The author’s premise here: a discerning eye can see that the pair of “medical” images in the flyer lack the tangibility of place, role, and emotion which are present in the hospital image, or even in many of Wolff ’s other images of people at work which show character or human interest. The flyer images are expert and sympathetic but quite anodyne and without emotion. The well-groomed “doctors” have nary a hair out of place, and significantly, there is no eye contact or even a view of the subjects’ eyes really at all. What we are given here is a small bit of the artifice which made Wolff a famous photographer: good use of background props, good framing, composition, and lighting, hitting all the notes of a successful image that conveys immediate meaning to the viewer, who easily may be drawn into the images personally because they are so well, even playfully, conceived. But for the author, this flyer’s images show Wolff, the consummate professional, simply pushing ahead here for commercial reasons, flying on auto-pilot.(8)
There are just a few other explicitly medical images in Wolff ’s oeuvre known to the author. These are shown on the opposite page. From Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica 1934, there are two, one of which derives from a series, (Serie 605, Frauenklinik, Frankfurt/Main, 1933) Women’s Clinic, Frankfurt / Main, 1933. The other, of a doctor and a nurse reading x-rays, does show some sense of the personalities of those depicted — it is an outlier here. There is also known an undated image of a youngish Dr. Wolff dressed as a doctor reading x-rays, which appears very similar to those in the flyer. About these additional images, per Thomas Sommer we do not know specifically why they were made, or even which photographer took them — Wolff, Tritschler, or some other of the firm’s Mitarbeiter. Of note, there are no medical pictures in either the later 1939 Meine Erfahrungen…, or in the somewhat similarly laid-out 1940 Japanese monograph on Wolff ’s work: The Paul Wolff Masterpiece Collection (バウル, ヴオルフ 傑作窵眞集).
One might think offhand that Wolff would excel at pictures of physicians because of his having been one himself, and especially since he kept the title throughout his life. One might have even expected, from Wolff ’s photographic vision, that he would have made Norman Rockwell-like images of the kindly general practitioner in his office with children, happy moments on the maternity ward, or of mass inoculations being given to further the health of the state. But no; suffice to say here that Wolff likely found it unpleasant to photograph medical scenes and doctors. His “medical” images definitely tend to show this by the omission of any affect, and the impersonal rendering of his subjects. One needs only to compare these images to many of Wolff ’s famous images of people at work to see the difference made by his apparent avoidance of feelings here, even though Wolff ’s best images are discreetly posed to show mostly the Disneyesque “quintessence” that Wolff himself intentionally wanted highlighted. A different and more useful contrast is to put the doctor images in this article next to almost any of the many doctor images made by the late Canadian Leica photographer Ted Grant, where one can immediately feel the intense emotional bond between the photographer and the doctors – no emotional elision and no play acting.
The author, a psychiatrist, thinks it likely that Wolff used his total immersion in his career, his strong abilities at playacting in setting up his images, and the intrinsic happiness of most of them, to shield himself from both his internal turmoil and also what was happening in Germany at the height of his career. His images of doctors are a possible key to unlock that narrative. But the pursuit of that hypothesis is a story for another time.
Meister der Kamera erzählen, Wilhelm Schöppe, editor. Halle, Saale: Knapp, 1935, p. 59
H-M Koetzle, in Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler: Light and Shadow – Photo- graphs from 1920 to 1950, Hans-Michael Koetzle editor. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag 2019; p. 420
Manfred Heiting; personal communicationSabine Hock, in Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler: Light and Shadow – Photo- graphs from 1920 to 1950, Hans-Michael Koetzle editor. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag 2019; pp. 132-139
Ibid, Koetzle, p. 420 but translated by the author from the original German of Wolff ’s autobiography.
Thomas Sommer, personal communication.
Sabine Hock, in Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler: Light and Shadow – Photo- graphs from 1920 to 1950, Hans-Michael Koetzle editor. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag 2019; pp. 132-139
Dr. Kristina Lemke, Wolff researcher, thinks this flyer was likely set up by a clearly defined advertising order with Wanderer-Werke, and involved a graphic artist and probably other persons such as those who supplied the medical equipment. Wolff had likely little personal scope here, in her opinion. Wolff was also involved in other advertising campaigns at the time. Personal communication.
Parenthetically, the typewriter aspect of this flyer goes further and may be more important overall for understanding Wolff ’s work practices than merely a focus on its doctor aspect. The portable typewriter in the flyer was a new product from Wanderer-Werke called the KLEIN-CONTINEN- TAL. This model was released near the end of the 1920s which helps us date this flyer. The Klein-Continental was marketed until after WWII, and is apparently a well-known model. There is a familiar circa 1928 image of Dr. Wolff, seated and apparently deep in thought, pipe jauntily hanging from his mouth, flat cap on his head, and this model typewriter in his lap. (fig 4) Could the typewriter in that image have both been the very one depicted in the flyer, and also Wolff ’s stipend from Wanderer for producing the flyer? Even if not, Wolff may well have essentially product-placed the typewriter (and himself!) in that later image for possible future use. Wolff was an excellent networker and self-promoter, and just a few years later, in 1935, Wolff perhaps unsurprisingly did major work for Wanderer-Werke, producing one of his industrial books for the 50th Anniversary of that company.