Herbert List: The Monograph

by Max Scheler, Herbert List (photographer)

Herbert List, who died in 1975, was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Early in his career he photographed primarily in Italy and Greece, attracted like many previous travelers to the countries' beauty. List came of age in Germany during the development of the "new objectivity"; his photographs, surreal in aesthetic, in certain ways parallel de Chirico's paintings. After World War II he photographed the ruins of Munich, portraying the consequences of destruction by means of a classical visual form. List was the youngest of a famous group of photographers -- Hoyningen-Huene, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst -- and his photographic oeuvre is perhaps the freshest and most artistic of these distinguished individuals.

This large volume assembles 250 of Herbert List's most famous images in the first comprehensive compilation of his work. The photographs are organized according to five themes: Metaphysical Photography, Ruins and Fragments, Eros and Photography, Portraits, and Moments. Accompanying the images are essays written by five important historians of photography and art.

Genres: Photography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 2000

About the author

Max Scheler (August 22, 1874, Munich – May 19, 1928, Frankfurt am Main) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Scheler developed further the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and was called by José Ortega y Gasset "the first man of the philosophical paradise." After his demise in 1928, Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such."[1] In 1954, Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, defended his doctoral thesis on "An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler."

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

“composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances.”