Dr. Paul Wolff’s Family Pictures
This is the first of three articles based upon images received from Ashley Wolff, Dr. Paul Wolff ’s granddaughter. These articles are an attempt to answer several otherwise unanswered biographic questions:
What was the nature of Paul Wolff ’s photographic vision and how much did the Leica influence this?
What was the reason for Wolff ’s leaving Alsace for Frankfurt after WWI?
Why did Wolff keep the title ”Dr”, and does this throw any light upon Wolff ’s behavior during the Nazi regime?
More than once in his life, this author has wondered about the home lives of famous or very talented people – were they any different based upon their specialized knowledge from the way one’s family, friends, or neighbors did things? Specifically, when the famous person was a photographer, what sort of pictures did they make of their children, their spouse, their in-laws? Did their child complain about the picture-taking (like this author’s own), “Oh no, here goes Pop again”?
Were their pictures any different from those of other doting parents?
Recently the author had the opportunity to meet Ashley Wolff, granddaughter of Dr. Paul Wolff from his first marriage, and view small prints that Dr. Wolff had made of his wife and young family in the period of approximately 1911 to 1925. The author was thrilled with this encounter, both with the chance to meet such a gracious relative of Dr. Wolff, and to share family history and pictures. Ashley brought with her the expected types of family pictures such as various family groups enjoying themselves and shots of individual family members, but chosen here from her collection are a few that especially appealed to an outside observer and historian of Dr. Wolff ’s life and work. The images chosen are all of Paul Wolff ’s first wife, Helene (Dörr), and/or his son, Klaus, Ashley's father, born in 1916. Ashley then kindly scanned these images, and quite minor adjustments to them were made in Adobe Photoshop to compensate for 100 years of fading, mostly adjusting levels and occasional spotting.
It is not at all certain what equipment Dr. Wolff used for these images, only to say that it was likely not a large format plate camera, nor a Leica (which was not in existence then). One’s hunch is that what was used was some sort of roll-film folding camera using 120 medium format film (or larger obsolete sizes such as 116 and 122 films), cameras such as a Contessa, an Ernemann, or perhaps a Kodak. Possibly several different such cameras were used through this span of years. These cameras in general were smaller and had faster lenses than contemporary plate cameras, and this allowed them to be easily carried by the photographer and used hand-held, such that the resulting compositions are potentially freer. The surmise is that the images here are all contact prints.
What strikes one quite forcibly about the pictures chosen here is that they have the look of Dr. Wolff ’s Leica images of years later. The author is not aware that Dr. Wolff took pictures of people with his large format equipment, but of course carefully choreographed people pictures were what he mostly did with his Leicas in the 1930’s; such was his specialty. From what one can tell of Dr. Wolff ’s pre-Leica people pictures from the examples here, his vision is little different from what he and others later termed: ’Lebendige Leica’ (lively Leica) photography.
The image of Helene in the mountains, from behind, is very similar to an image from Dr. Wolff ’s 1934 Meine Erfahrungen book (Plate 5), and is almost in the ratio of 24:36, but not quite. So, it is unlikely that this is a Leica shot, but it closely prefigures what was to come!
Several of the images involve moving in fairly close to the subject, with the subject and associated material more or less filling the frame, again typical of Dr. Wolff ’s later Leica shots. The average home photographer does not tend to do this. And while any of us might ask our spouse to sit in a picturesque place, or corral our children or in-laws to photograph them as a group, or try to photograph one of them individually performing a particular activity – diving into a pool or shooting a bow - Dr. Wolff, as he did again and again later in his career, directs his family members into natural-looking poses that have artistic and compositional interest. How he was able repeatedly to do this without caricature or awkwardness can only be explained on the basis of his great talent.
The image of Helene at the campfire was likely made with a tripod set-up, much like Dr. Wolff’s procedures with his much later factory images. The framing is too precise, and the DOF too large in the apparent darkness, for this to have been a hand-held shot.
One sees strong use of diagonals in several of these images of Klaus especially, and again this is typical of Dr. Wolff ’s vision throughout his career.
Dr. Wolff in these early images often utilizes selective focus, opening his lens up wide with only the subject in focus, to draw our eye into what he felt was important pictorially. While we tend not to see much use of this technique in Dr. Wolff ’s later images, Wolff instead substituted honing in to the subject with extreme close-ups and with deep depth of field. It is, however, the same idea of isolating “the part that represents the whole, the quintessential feature” (to quote Dr. Wolff), even though the later technique is different and usually requires a tripod for exact framing and because of the slower exposure with the lens closed down.
Overall, it is the “liveliness” of these pictures that really shines through. These are real people engaged in living their lives, even if they were likely posed for the shots. This ability to capture and even slightly enhance reality – and often to make us smile - was Dr. Wolff ’s photographic gift. And to answer the question posed at the start of this article, in this case the famous person does indeed perform on a higher plane than most of us could.