Helmut Gernsheim

Gernsheim, Helmut
Born	1 March 1913 Munich
Died	20 July 1995
Known for	photo historian and collector

Helmut Erich Robert Kuno Gernsheim (1 March 1913 – 20 July 1995) was a renowned historian of photography, collector, and photographer.

Biography

Born in Munich, Germany, Gernsheim studied art history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He took up photography in 1934 at the urging of his brother who thought it a more practical profession, and graduated from the State School of Photography, Munich, after two year's study. He started working as a colour photographer in the using the German Uvachrome process before going to Paris for an exhibition of his work and then to London to work on a commission from the National Gallery. He was given British citizenship in 1946 and continued to live in London for most of his life.

At the outset of World War II he was interned for a year in Australia along with other German nationals during which time he wrote his critique on photography, New Photo Vision, which was published in 1942 and led to his becoming a friend of fellow critic and historian Beaumont Newhall. After being released from internment he worked for the National Buildings Record, photographing important monuments in the London area with a view to revealing their artistic merits. These photographs became the basis of two more books, and in 1943 were described by The Architectural Review as "nothing short of a rediscovery of the Baroque monuments". Around this time he met and married his wife Alison Eames Gernsheim.

In 1945, at Newhall's prompting, Helmut and Alison started collecting the works of historic photographers, especially British ones, which were fast disappearing since few people valued them. They amassed a huge collection containing work by such luminaries as Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Hill & Adamson, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Louis Daguerre. They rediscovered the long-lost hobby of Lewis Carroll when in 1947 Helmut stumbled across an album of Carroll's portraits in a junk shop. Ultimately this collection, along with an estimated 3-4 million words of notes on the subject led to his writing the 180,000 word book The History of Photography. When the first edition was published by the OUP in 1955 it became an instant classic and the definitive reference work for historians of photography for decades afterwards, being described by Beaumont Newhall as "a milestone in the history of photography" and by other reviewers as "the photographer's bible" and "an encyclopaedic work". Along the way, in 1952 Gernsheim discovered the long-lost world's first permanent photograph from nature, created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 (View from the Window at Le Gras). Helmut and Alison continued to publish numerous articles and books on various aspects of photography and a variety of photographers.

Ultimately Gernsheim needed to find a home for his vast collection of over 33,000 photographs, 4,000 books, research notes, his own correspondence, and collected correspondence including letters by Daguerre and Fox Talbot . He sought unsuccessfully to found a national museum of photography in the UK (ultimately a National Museum did not happen until 1983). In the end, after many fruitless discussions with authorities and potential sponsors in several countries, he sold everything to the University of Texas at Austin in 1963 where it formed the basis of a new Department of Photography at the Humanities Research Center.

Alison Gernsheim died on March 27, 1969. Helmut died on July 20, 1995.

Honors and Awards

• 1959, German Cultural Prize for Photography
• 1968, appointed consultant to Encyclopedia Britannica
• 1974, appointed trustee of the Swiss Foundation of Photography
• 1979, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Texas
• 1981, Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Arizona
• 1981, Gold Medal of the Academy of Fine Arts at Salsomaggiore
• Honorary Fellow of the Photographic Historical Society of New York
• Honorary Fellow of the Club Daguerre, Frankfurt

Bibliography

• Alvin Langdon Coburn: Photographer, with Alison Gernsheim, New York: Praeger, 1966.
• Beautiful London, New York: Phaidon, 1950. (photographs by Helmut Gernsheim)
• Churchill: His Life in Photographs, Helmut Gernsheim and Randolph S. Churchill, eds., London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1955.
• A Concise History of Photography, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Thames & Hudson, 1965.
• Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends 1839-1960, London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1962.
• Edward VII and Queen Alexandra: A Biography in Word and Picture, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Frederick Muller, 1962.
• Focus on Architecture and Sculpture, an original approach to the photography of architecture and sculpture,, London: Fountain Press, 1949.
• Fotografia Artistica: Tendinte Estetice 1839–1960, Bucuresti: Editura Meridiane 1970.
• Historic Events 1839–1939, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1960.
• The History of Photography From the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914 with Alison Gernsheim, London: Oxford University Press 1955; revised edition Thames & Hudson. 1969
• Incunabula of British Photographic Literature: A Bibliography of British Photographic Literature 1839–75 and British Books Illustrated with Original Photographs, London and Berkeley: Scolar Press in association with Derbyshire College of Higher Education 1984.
• Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work, London: Fountain Press, 1948.
• L. J. M. Daguerre. The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Secker & Warburg, 1956. [With “Bibliography of Daguerre’s Instruction Manuals” by Beaumont Newhall.]
• Lewis Carroll, photographer, London: Max Parrish, 1949.
• The Man Behind the Camera, Helmut Gernsheim, ed. London: Fountain Press [November] 1948 (foreword by Rathbone Holme). [With chapters on Cecil Beaton, Gernsheim, E.O. Hoppé, Angus McBean, Felix H. Man, Mrs. K.M. Parsons, W. Suchitzky, Harold White, and J. Allan Cash.]
• Masterpieces of Victorian Photography, London: Phaidon Press, 1951.
• The New Photo Vision, London: Fountain Press, 1942.
• The Origins of Photography, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1982.
• The Recording Eye. A Hundred Years of Great Events as Seen by the Camera, 1839–1939, with Alison Gernsheim, New York: Putnam, 1960.
• Roger Fenton, Photographer of the Crimean War. His Photographs and his Letters from The Crimea, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Secker & Warburg, 1954.
• Those Impossible English, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1952. (text: Quentin Bell; photographs selected by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim).
• Victoria R. A Biography with Four Hundred Illustrations based on her Personal Photograph Albums, with Alison Gernsheim, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959.

References

• Anglo-American Name Authority File, s.v. “Gernsheim, Helmut”, LC Control Number n 79004055. Accessed 19 December 2007.