A selection of his most extraordinary vintage photographs, manipulations of form, light and movement printed between the 1898s and 1911s. “Two difficult aspects have always dominated my character: provocation and curiosity; in more refined terms: a thirst for knowledge. And so I became a photographer in spite of academic painting, but I remained a painter in spite of photography.” Heinz Hajek-Halke, born in Berlin in 1916, little known to the general public, is one of the pioneers of XNUMXth century photography who marked the plot of the last century with a strong personality. After spending his childhood in Argentina, in XNUMX he returned to his hometown where he reunited with his father Paul Halke, a painter and cartoonist, his first drawing teacher, and began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts. leaving his studies to enlist in the First World War in XNUMX, he resumed them after two years, first attending the courses of the painter Emil Orlik and then the lessons of Hans Baluschek, which he considered more progressive and less conventional.
From 1923 he worked as a photojournalist for the Press-Photo news agency, experimenting, right from the start, with various techniques: photomontages, double exposures, collage. Photomontage was for him above all a means of opening up to photographic technique "an immense possibility of expanding its means of artistic expression". He collaborates with the great photographers Willi Ruge and Else Neulander (Yva) to develop increasingly complex images. His works will be requested by the most famous magazines of the Weimar Republic. During the Second World War he retired to Lake Constance in Switzerland, where he began to deal with scientific photography in the field of insect biology. Through a large optical bench he explores different techniques of chemical manipulation, light distortion and magnification on small subjects. In 1949 he became a member of "Fotoform", a pre-eminent avant-garde group of West German photographers founded by Otto Steinert; six years later he began teaching photography and graphics at the Berlin University of the Arts. Among his students there are personalities who have marked the history of photography such as Dieter Appelt and Floris Neussus. The need to experiment, to search for new forms by recreating macrocosms through enlargements of microcosms, pushes Heinz Hajek-Halke in the mid-50s to abandon the camera and concentrate his work in the darkroom, following in the footsteps of Man Ray and László Moholy Nagy, demonstrating the validity of photography as an expressive means in the development of abstract images on paper. 3 With a series of "guided accidents" through chemical reactions of acids, solvents or paints on objects such as glass, fabrics, liquids and plastics, he directly produces negatives on glass. He also studies the movement of structures built with flexible wires and their play of light, through which he gives shape to figures, defined as "Lichtgrafik" (graphics of light) by the German critic and art historian Franz Roh.
These numerous experiments fall, in terms of physical-chemical processes, into an experimental alchemical research, a sort of gray area between art and science where Heinz Hajek-Halke, an enigmatic, individualist, anarchist man, moves and guides his fictional. The di lui is a systematic work, made up of preparatory drawings, recurring themes and previous solutions re-evaluated and revised over time to confirm their validity. In this process Heinz Hajek-Halke always remained a photographer and his preparatory studies transformed his photographic prints into images. Ten years before his death, which took place in Berlin in 1983, Heinz Hajek-Halke, without heirs, delivered his complete work to the photographer and friend Michael Ruetz, who, after precise archiving, donated it to the Archiv der Akademie der Künste of Berlin of which he is a member. Two books were published during his lifetime: Experimentelle photographie in 1955 and Lichtgraphik in 1964. In 2002 the Center Pompidou in Paris dedicated the first major retrospective to Heinz Hajek-Halke curated by Alain Sayag and in 2012 the Akademie der Künste in Berlin a ' major anthology curated by Michael Ruetz.
