Heinrich Heidersberger
Heinrich Heidersberger (1906–2006) built a machine that drew with light, and used it for half a century. Born in Ingolstadt on 10 June 1906 and raised in Linz and in Denmark, he went to Paris to study painting under Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne in Montparnasse, fell in with the Surrealists, and came to photography sideways — by photographing his own paintings. He turned professional at the end of the 1920s and made his name twice over: in the 1940s with the light-projection nudes of the Kleid aus Licht series for Stern, and after the war as the photographer of the Braunschweig School architects — Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer, Dieter Oesterlen, Walter Henn — where his precise sightlines set the look of West German postwar building. The Rhythmograms came out of a commission. Asked in 1955 to make a mural for the new engineering school at Wolfenbüttel, he began building an apparatus to record light directly onto photographic material: four harmonically damped pendulums swinging a mechanically linked mirror against a point source, with frequency, phase, amplitude and damping as the only controls. The results are Lissajous figures drawn in light — camera-less photographs with no subject at all, each one a machine's record of its own motion. The Rhythmograph took a silver medal at the 1957 Milan Triennale. In 1961 he moved his studio into Wolfsburg Castle, where he lived and worked until his death on 14 July 2006, aged one hundred; the city made him an honorary citizen in 2003. His son Benjamin founded the Institut Heidersberger in the castle in 2002, and it keeps the archive still. The three sheets here — Umflochtenes Grau, Rotation and Spleen — are original prints on Agfa paper from 1960, the heart of the Rhythmogram years.
3 physical works
