Andreas Feininger looking at negatives with a magnifying glass.
(Photo by Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
Andreas Feininger (American, 1906-1999), the son of painter Lyonel Feininger, was born in Paris, and studied in Germany at the Weimar Bauhaus where he trained as an architect and photographer. He worked in Paris with Le Corbusier for one year. In 1939, circumstances surrounding the onset of WWII forced him to move to New York City where he joined the Black Star Agency as a freelance photographer. Feininger’s interest in the wonders of the industrial age of the 1930s, and in the structure and clarity of objects and machines, directed his focus away from people as subject matter, in his preferred medium of the pure black and white image. Feininger was a LIFE staff photographer with over 400 assignments from 1943-1962. He received numerous awards for his photographs and wrote many books on the technical aspects of shooting distinctly unique neighborhoods of New York City, abstract patterns of architecture and construction, and wonders of the natural world.
His work illustrated here, 76th Street Beach with the Illinois Steel Company in the background, c. 1940, is somewhat atypical in illustrating people about their leisure. “We basked in the sun on Lake Michigan’s beaches where we joined the festive Sunday crowd. I took all my pictures with a 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 inch twin reflex camera, a Rolleiflex. The film was Kodak Super-XX, the developer Kodak D-76. Alltogether, I exposed 26 rolls of film from which I subsequently chose the pictures for this book. To my great disappointment, it never made the magazine.” (Feininger’s Chicago, 1941, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1980)
Woman holding miniature camera | Jewish Shop on the Lower East Side, Manhattan | Howard Johnson’s, Times Square | (Chinese lettering on building, Chinatown) | (Holiday Hostesses, Times Square) | (Building Reflections, Midtown) | Tigers (Natural history store window) | 76th Street Beach with the Illinois Steel Company in the background
Andreas Feininger
Woman holding miniature camera, 1949
Gelatin silver print
2012.5.63
Andreas Feininger
Jewish Shop on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
2012.5.58
Andreas Feininger
Howard Johnson’s, c.1960s
Gelatin silver print
2015.5.42
Andreas Feininger
Chinese Lettering, c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
2015.5.37
Andreas Feininger
Holiday Hostesses, c. 1970s
Gelatin silver print
2015.5.29
Andreas Feininger
(Building Reflections, Midtown), 1981
Gelatin silver print
2015.5.21
Andreas Feininger
Tigers, c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
2015.5.34
Andreas Feininger
Beach Scene, c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
2015.5.65
Images by Jacqui Hopely Monkell