- Wolfgang Sievers
Wolfgang Georg Sievers, AO (
18 September ,1913 –7 August ,2007 ) was anAustralia nphotographer who specialised in architectural and industrial photography.Sievers was born in
Berlin ,Germany . His father was Professor Johannes Sievers, an art and architectural historian with the German Foreign Office until his dismissal by theNazi government in 1933. He authored the first four volumes of a monograph on neo-classical architect Karl Schinkel. His mother was Herma Schiffer, a writer and educator of Jewish background who was Director of the Institute for Educational Films.He studied at the
Contempora School for the Applied Arts in Berlin (an off-shoot of the famousBauhaus ) from 1936 to 1938, which like the Bauhaus, strongly emphasized the unity of all applied arts. He took architectural photographs for his father's books on Berlin's historical buildings, particularly the work of Karl Schinkel. He also spent a year working inPortugal 1935 to 1936. In 1938, he was retained as a teacher at the Contempora, but decided to immigrate to Australia following news of the school's immanent closure by the authorities. He had arranged for his photographic equipment to be transported, but was briefly questioned by theGestapo , then conscripted as an aerial photographer for theLuftwaffe . He fled the country immediately, going first toEngland in June.quote
In the evening I took the train toCologne ... The next day I was inHolland , the day after that I was in England, inKent , where my brother lived already, and he took me to the pub and I got drunk on cloudy Kentish cider for the first time in my life. Was wonderful!, The Age,April 21 ,2007 , p. 11]In Australia, Sievers opened a studio in
South Yarra ,Melbourne . After war was declared, he volunteered for the Australian Army and served from 1942 to 1946. Following demobilsation, he established a studio atGrosvenor Chambers in fashionable Collins Street, initially drawing many of his commissions from fellow European immigrants including the architect Frederick Romberg, and Ernst Fuchs who had arrived fromVienna . During his early years in Melbourne, Sievers became a lifelong friend of fellow emigre photographerHelmut Newton and his Australian actress wifeJune Browne , who later made photographs herself under the pseudonym "Alice Springs".Work
Significant corporate clients included
Alcoa ,Australian Pulp and Paper Manufacturers ,Comalco ,Hamersley Iron ,John Holland ,John Lysaght , Shell andVickers Ruwolt . He also received commissions from architectural firms includingBates, Smart and McCutcheon ,Hassall & McConnell ,Leith & Bartlett ,Winston Hall andYuncken and Freeman . In the 1950s, Sievers was engaged by the then Department of Overseas Trade with a brief to change Australia's image from a land of sheep and wool to an image of a sophisticated industrial and manufacturing nation. Many of these images were published inWalkabout magazine .Sievers' work after the war was imbued with the
Bauhaus ethos and philosophy of theNew Objectivity he had learned in Berlin, combined with a socialist belief in the inherent dignity of labour. His photographs were often overtly theatrical, as he commonly photographed industrial machinery at night, isolating details with artificial light and posing workers for heightened effect. This can be seen in 'Gears for Mining Industry' (1967), perhaps his most well known single image. This approach was extraordinarily influential in Australian post-war commercial photography.In 1989, the
Australian National Gallery staged a retrospective of his work, an exhibition which travelled around the country, often accompanied by Sievers' lectures. In 2000, he was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition held inLisbon ,Portugal at the "Arquivo Fotografico Municipal de Lisboa". For his services to photography, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2002.The
National Library of Australia has an archive of more than 50,000 of Sievers' negatives and transparencies.Sievers was active in Australia, Germany and Austria with research into the emigration of war criminals to Australia from 1990 to 1998. In 2007, he donated several hundred photographs from his archive, worth up to AUS$1 million, to raise money for justice and civil liberties causes.
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