Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898–1983) was a German experimental photographer and educator who co-founded the Fotoform group with Otto Steinert.
Life and work
Heinz Hajek-Halke, born in Berlin, Germany in 1898, the son of Paul Halke. He spent part of his childhood in Argentina. He started to study
graphics
Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture ...
in Berlin in 1915, served as a soldier in 1916 in World War I, and then continued his studies after that.
Heinz Hajek-Halke worked as a
photo editor
Microsoft Photo Editor is a raster graphics editor component of Microsoft Office first included with Microsoft Office 97. It features editing tools to texturize, create negatives, adjust gamma, and add transparency to GIF images. It was replaced in ...
,
press photographer
Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (such ...
, and commercial artist, concentrating almost from the start on montage techniques. In the 1930s with the rise of the Nazis he lived quietly and photographed small animal life-forms.
In 1937, Hajek-Halke travelled to Brazil where he produced, a documentary about a snake farm. He returned to Germany, in 1939.
During World War II, he was conscripted by the German army and worked as an aerial and company photographer for the Dornier aircraft company on Lake Constance. After the war he spent a short time as a French prisoner of war . He then made a living by selling snake venom to the pharmaceutical industry produced on his own snake farm.
In 1949, Hajek-Halke became a member of the German group Fotoform and his abstractions,
photomontages
Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image ...
and luminograms were included in the first of two "subjektive fotografie" exhibitions.
Hajek-Halke was appointed lecturer in photography and
graphic design
Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...
Felix H. Man
Hans Felix Sigismund Baumann aka Felix H. Man (November 30, 1893 – January 30, 1985) was a photographer and later an art collector.German Society for Photography. During his lifetime he published two books, ''Experimentelle Fotografie'' and ''Lichtgrafik''. He died in Berlin in 1983.