Dr. Paul Wolff & Alfred Tritschler - The Printed Images 1906-2019 (BOOK ON PHOTOBOOKS, MINT CONDITION) - 2021

THIS IS THE LAST EXCLUSIVE PHOTOBOOK AUCTION by 5Uhr30.com in 2025 -
with more than 100 great lots from my personal collection and from recent acquisitions.

GREAT OPPORTUNITY to purchase this FANTASTIC BOOK, showing all the publications by German Dr. Paul Wolff and Alfred Tritschler between 1906 and 2019 - in BRANDNEW CONDITION.

MUST-HAVE SECONDARY LITERATURE BOOK ABOUT PHOTOBOOKS:
Daniel Blaize, Anatole Desachy, Jean-Marie Donat, "The book of books on photobooks", pages 336-339.

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600 (!) PAGES. 2.980 (!) PHOTOS.
BREATH-TAKING BOOK PROJECT AND OBJECT.

New, mint, unread; still originally shrink-wrapped in publisher's plastic foil.
COLLECTOR'S COPY.

"This book presents the publications of Dr. Paul Wolff and Alfred Tritschler, revealing both their extraordinary technical and artistic abilities as well as their successful business acumen. The multifaceted work of Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler encompasses industrial reportages, social documentaries, news coverage, sports and leisure photography, advertising campaigns, and promotional films. The volume brings together more than 1,000 well-known photobooks in addition to their extensive magazine contributions, and it highlights Wolff’s pioneering achievements in 35mm Leica photography—both in black-and-white and, for the first time, in color.
Using the photographic publications of Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler, this book convincingly shows for the first time how 35mm Leica photography—and the development of color photography—transformed society and the “new” consumer during the Weimar Republic and the “Third Reich,” and what leading role Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler played in this process. Their success was closely tied to the rise of visual media and advertising, as well as their misuse for ideological purposes. In the context of their concrete applications—especially in the 1930s—the photographic publications of Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler thus take on political significance. By examining for the first time the many publications of this photographic duo both in Germany and abroad, this book becomes the definitive overview of their multifaceted work."
(from the publisher)

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Steidl, Göttingen. 2021. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover (as issued). 266 x 288 mm. 600 pages. 2980 photos. Edited by Manfred Heiting and Kristina Lemke. Text in English and German.

EXHAUSTIVE, HIGHLY IMPRESSIVE COLLECTION of publications by Dr. Paul Wolff and Alfred Tritschler - in perfect condition.

'Paul Wolff (1887-1951) was a German photographer and a pioneer in the field of 35mm photography. In recognition of his photographic achievements as a pioneer of Leica photography, he received the two hundred thousandth Leica from the Ernst Leitz company in 1936.
As a twelve-year-old, he was already enthusiastic about taking photographs with a plate camera. However, after leaving school, he first studied medicine, qualified as a doctor in Strasbourg in 1914, became an assistant doctor and was called up for military service in 1914. After the First World War, he was expelled from Strasbourg, which now belonged to France again, in 1919. He moved to Frankfurt am Main. There he initially worked in the copying plant of a financially weak film company. Using a film camera he had bought himself, he initially began to work on commissions for the film company, but soon became self-employed.
He produced films and photographed the housing estates for the New Frankfurt project. Paul Wolff switched from moving images back to photography. He worked with an 18 × 24 cm plate camera and had plenty of commissions. In 1926, he won his first Leica at the International Photo Exhibition in Frankfurt: it was to have a lasting influence on the rest of his life. Initially, he used the Leica to take "incidental" photos of small, pleasant scenes at markets, in alleyways and along paths after his work with the large-format camera was done. He improved his technique and soon caused a sensation in the magazines with his lively 35mm photos. The dynamic style of the unleashed 35mm camera was born. In 1927, he was looking for the ideal collaborator and found him in his business partner Alfred Tritschler.
The two then founded the company Dr Paul Wolff & Tritschler in Frankfurt am Main. Paul Wolff's breakthrough as a photographer came in 1933, when the Leitz company ordered 100 enlargements in 40 × 60 cm format from him for the exhibition Die Kamera, which subsequently travelled around the world as a touring exhibition. The first edition of Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica was published in 1934. Translated into four languages, this book became one of the standard works of photography. In the same year, Paul Wolff travelled to what was then the Saar region. On this occasion, he took gripping pictures of people, everyday life, landscapes and industrial plants such as the Völklingen Ironworks. In 1936, Paul Wolff and his colleague Alfred Tritschler photographed the Summer Olympics and subsequently published the book Was ich bei den Olympischen Spielen 1936 sah, which appeared in four languages.
Wolff not only photographed with the Leica, but also continued to use large-format cameras, preferably in 9 × 12 cm format with a Schneider Angulon 120 mm wide-angle lens for outdoor shots.
In 1940, Paul Wolff published the first German industrial photo book in colour. Im Kraftfeld von Rüsselsheim was published with a print run of 55,000 copies; in the same year he published the first edition of Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica in colour.
In 1944, his house in Frankfurt was destroyed in a bombing raid and large parts of his archive of plate images were destroyed; only the archive of small images, which had been stored away, survived. The Frankfurt Institute for City History preserves an extensive collection of photographs taken between 1927 and 1943 of Frankfurt's historic city centre, which was destroyed in 1944. In 1949-50, he photographed the illustrated book Deutschland - ein Bildband von deutscher Landschaft, ihren Städten, Dörfern und Menschen for the Umschau publishing house, in which Alsfeld is shown, among other places.
After his death, his co-managing director Alfred Tritschler continued to run the Dr Paul Wolff & Tritschler picture archive. In 1963, it was taken over by Alfred Tritschler's nephew, Robert Sommer in Offenburg, who continued to run it successfully and handed it over to his son Thomas Sommer in 1979. Today, the photo archive covers the period from 1927 to 1970 and has a stock of around 500,000 negatives.
Wolff's grave is located in Frankfurt's main cemetery, Gewann II GG 17a.
Paul Wolff's first marriage was to Helene Dörr (1887-1959). Their son Klaus Heinrich Wolff was born in Strasbourg on 1 May 1916 (died 1988). Wolff's second son Stephan Wolff (born 1943) was the result of a second marriage to Annette Beiger (1906-2002).
Wolff had a warm friendship with the designer of the Leica, Oscar Barnack. He was also personally connected to the head of Leitzwerke Ernst Leitz.
in Königstein i. Ts. in 1929 as part of the Blue Books series, quickly achieved several large print runs. With Wolff's project "botanical photographic studies", which he immediately proposed to the publisher Langewiesche in 1929 and which appeared in 1931 under the title Formen des Lebens (Forms of Life), he consciously engaged with the protagonists of New Vision such as Karl Bloßfeldt, Ernst Fuhrmann and Albert Renger-Patzsch. In his book Sonne über See und Strand (Sun over Sea and Beach), he mainly photographed people and created a beautiful contemporary document of fashion in the 1940s. It is interesting to note that the captions are printed in three languages.
Wolff and Tritschler's agency photographs covered a wide range of subjects that catered to mass tastes: from fashion, advertising and still lifes to architectural, industrial and landscape photography, travel reports and sports shots. They used the stylistic devices of New Objectivity, gained experience with the aesthetics of National Socialism and documented bombed-out Frankfurt from a distance.'
(Wikipedia)