Beech Forest in Fall (Büchenwald im Herbst)

Albert Renger-Patzsch approached his subjects in a matter-of-fact style exemplary of the art movement New Objectivity, which flourished in Germany between the wars. Rejecting the artsy manipulations associated with Pictorialism, still widely practiced in the 1920s, he embraced the camera as a neutral tool for documentation, publishing his images in the enormously popular 1928 book The World Is Beautiful. This photograph was among five that Hugh Edwards acquired from the photographer Lotte Jacobi, bringing Renger-Patszch—whom he called “the father of most ‘modern’ subject matter in photography”—into the collection. In a slight departure from the stark realism of many of Renger’s photographs, here the atmospheric fog produces an eerie but sublime experience of the woods.