Les Douches la Galerie presents a new exhibition dedicated to Ernst Haas. Composed of twenty color photographs, taken mainly in New York, it reveals the most personal and poetic project of the American photographer, around abstraction. This astonishing series coincides with the publication this fall of a book, Ernst Haas Abstract, which will be a landmark in his bibliography.
Ernst Haas’ Abstract project represents one of the most daring and personal stages in the work of this pioneer of color photography. Conceived in the 1970s as an audiovisual slideshow, Abstract was inspired by images taken at all stages of the photographer’s career, from 1952 to 1984. Little known to the general public, this complex project embodies Haas’s singular vision, which saw photography as a fluid, poetic, and perpetually moving art.
On the occasion of the release of the book Abstract and the exhibition at Les Douches la Galerie, Alexander Haas, the photographer’s son, shares his testimony on the genesis of this project. He discusses his father’s passion for cinema, color, and music, central elements in his artistic practice that find their most accomplished expression in Abstract. For Ernst Haas, this project, matured over decades, represented the peak of his career, a tireless quest for abstract images that he drew from both nature and everyday scenes.
The Abstract project is certainly the most complex and least known of all those that your father, Ernst Haas, has carried out. For what reasons?
My father was a great film buff. It was a project that he had throughout his life: to do something with all these abstract photos that he had taken. When he saw, in the 70s, that technology allowed to have several slide projectors that worked at the same time and, thus, to present the images in a cross-fade, he finally obtained what he had been looking for for a long time. For him, these abstractions were everywhere, in nature as in any subject. And from there, he really found his way. I see him working at night on these abstractions, and I realized that it brought him enormous joy. My father was a music lover and the fact that he combined this slideshow with abstract music, in this case that of the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, allowed him to express himself differently and to elevate his photographic work to a higher level.
Is this really the culmination of his work?
For him, yes, clearly. At the end of his life, when he participated in workshops, he showed this slideshow, Abstract, as a priority. It must be admitted that it was also, for him, a way of anticipating his death. The book, which is coming out this fall (by Prestel), is quite dark in tone. We sense that there is a reflection turned towards himself, and a great melancholy in his images.
Has color always been an obsession for your father?
He lived during the Second World War in Vienna, Austria, and it was a gray time for him, as he admitted. So he wanted to see color everywhere and he spent his life tracking it down, even if, when he arrived in the United States, that didn’t stop him from making black and white. But the majority of his work is in color and that’s how he was recognized as an artist.
How do you go from a slideshow to a book project, which is coming out this fall, accompanied by this exhibition at Les Douches la Galerie?
I always thought that this slideshow could lead to a book and I am delighted about it. It is not an easy work to understand, but it is truly an artistic project. As for the prints for the exhibition – C-prints and inkjet prints – they were made two or three years ago in two Parisian laboratories, Cyclope and Picto, and I am really amazed by the modernity of these images, thanks to current technology. It is really wonderful to see that these abstract photographs, which were taken in the 1950s, could ultimately have been taken today.
Interview by Philippe Séclier.
Ernst Haas (1921-1986) is recognized as one of the great photographers of the 20th century, and is a pioneer of color photography. He was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1921 and began photographing during World War II. His work on the return of Austrian prisoners of war attracted the attention of Life, but he declined the offer to become the American magazine’s staff photographer in order to maintain his independence. He joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1949, at the invitation of Robert Capa, and became friends with him as well as with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Werner Bischof.
Ernst Haas moved to New York in 1951 and soon began using Kodachrome film, taking his first color photographs in Mexico. In 1953, Life published a twenty-four-page photo essay of his work on New York, the largest color essay ever published by the magazine (Images of a magic city. Austrian photographer finds fresh wonder in New York’s familiar sights).
In 1962, just before retiring, Edward Steichen, director of the MoMA photography department, devoted a major retrospective to him, Ernst Haas: Color Photography, fourteen years before the exhibition also devoted to color, William Eggleston’s Guide, organized by John Szarkowski, who had succeeded Steichen, at the famous New York museum. Ernst Haas traveled extensively throughout his career, working for Life, but also Vogue, Look and Esquire. He published several books throughout his life: The Creation (1971), In America (1975), In Germany (1976), and Himalayan Pilgrimage (1978). In 1986, the year of his death, he received the Hasselblad Prize.
Ernst Haas : Les forces de l’abstraction
Until January 25, 2025
Les Douches la Galerie
5, rue Legouvé
75010 Paris
01 78 94 03 00
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
