Forest in Winter (Grunewald, Berlin), 1935

About the Work

“Peculiar perspectives result from the hemispherical camera’s images of everyday life,” commented the magazine Volk und Welt (People and World) in 1937 on AEG Berlin’s latest technical achievement. The illustrations for the quoted article came from the former Bauhaus student Umbo, who was commissioned to carry out the first series of tests on the “cloud camera”. By way of a fisheye lens, the pictures were taken at a viewing angle of more than 180 degrees. The search for new ways of seeing in photography did not simply cease after 1933, instead it was deliberately pursued with propagandistic intentions, as Germany wanted to demonstrate its economic and technical supremacy over foreign developments of camera developments.