Aenne Biermann: Up Close and Personal

The first English-language monograph since the 1930s on the legendary avant-garde photographer Aenne Biermann.

Aenne Biermann (1898–1933) was one of the leading figures of photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, she is considered one of the most important avant-garde photographers of the twentieth century. In just a few years of practice, the self-taught artist became a well-known representative of German photography, participating in almost all the important exhibitions of her time. She captured plants, objects, people, and everyday situations in pictures that have to this day lost none of their allure and poignancy. By means of clear structures, precise compositions of light and contrast, as well as narrow framing, she drew a special kind of poetry out of the motifs of her personal environment and developed her own, distinctly modern pictorial style.

This is the first substantial new book in English on this exceptional artist since the 1930s, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in fall 2021. The large-format volume features some one hundred of Aenne Biermann’s photographs in immaculately produced color and quadrotone reproductions, including several from the archive of the artist’s family that are published here for the first time ever. This impressive selection is complemented by essays on Biermann’s photography in an art-historical context and on selected aspects of her oeuvre.

Raz Samira is curator of photography at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.