About This Image

Vintage silver print, stamped "Estate Josef Breitenbach" on the back. There are copies of this image in the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography (No. 2007.51.16). Perhaps from a Nudist Camp series in either New Jersey or Pennsylvania. A truly beautiful print.

See: Josef Breitenbach, Photographien, Schimer/Mosel, 1996, p.154; Breitenbach Aktphotographien, Galerie Bodo Niemann, Berlin, p.25; T.O. Immisch/Ulrich Pohlmann et al. (ed.), Josef Breitenbach. Photographien. Zum 100. Geburtstag, exhib.cat. Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle i.a., Munich 1996, ill. 196.

Josef Breitenbach (April 3, 1896 in Munich, Germany – October 7, 1984 in New York City) was a photographer whose manipulated images and stark photographs were part of the Surrealistic movement.

Born in Munich to a middle-class family of Jewish descent, he attended technical high school from 1912 -1915 and trained as a salesman for an instrument firm and later as a bookkeeper for an insurance firm. He attended Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich (philosophy and art history, 1914 to 1917) and became active in the Youth Section and later the Pacifist wing of the Social Democratic Party.

Breitenbach opened a photographic studio in 1931, but the Nazis forced him to flee to Paris in 1933. where he opened a new studio. He went from there to New York where he worked for the American press and taught at several schools including Black Mountain College and The New School for Social Research. Through the 50s and 60s he did reportage in Asia for the United Nations and other varied businesses. He exhibited extensively in Europe in the 1930s (especially in Paris and London) and in the United States from the 40s to the mid-60s, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since his death, there have been 26 one-person exhibitions of his work, shown New York, Paris, Berlin, Munich, and multiple other locations in both Europe in the United States. Eight books have been published on his work, including two by Larissa Dryansky (Josef Breitenbach and Josef Breitenbach Manifesto) and Josef Breitenbach Photographien, published by Schirmer/Mosel. The Josef Breitenbach archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

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