More about Alfred Ehrhardt+
Alfred Ehrhardt (1901, Triptis – 1984, Hamburg) is regarded as an outstanding representative of German avant-garde photography for his abstract studies of nature. Ehrhardt was a musician, painter and art educator trained at the Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1933, the National Socialists dismissed him from the Hamburg State Art School because of his modern view of art; he subsequently became a photographer and filmmaker.
In photographic series such as The Wadden Sea, Curonian Spit, Crystals, and Shells and Snails, Ehrhardt combined tendencies of New Objectivity and New Vision photography. The compositional precision of his images reveals his artistic training. Influenced by Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature and Albert Renger-Patzsch’s The World Is Beautiful, he found in natural forms an artistic language of singular consistency.
Following Klee, who defined the study of nature as the starting point of artistic creation, Ehrhardt sought to depict the “elemental forces” of nature and the “absolute laws of all phenomena” in his photographs of natural subjects. He wanted to convey that human beings are only part of an “overwhelming, timeless” nature. It is no coincidence that he was called the “natural philosopher with a camera.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Ehrhardt was influenced by Goethe. He knew that Goethe collected not only stones but also shells. Goethe described his shells as “fetish-like sanctuaries” and recognized in the spiral a principle he extended from plants to all living beings: the interaction of the vertical, fixed axis with the spiral winding upward around it—the “vital incurvation as the fundamental tendency of life.”
With more than 20 photobooks to his name, Ehrhardt ranks among the most successful photographers of the former Bauhaus artists. He is considered the “most important German creator of post-war cultural films” and received numerous national and international awards for his more than 50 films, including four German Film Awards. The film Play of Spirals (1951), which earned him his second German Film Award, together with Dance of the Shells (1956) and Corals—Sculptures of the Seas (1964), belongs to his most formally powerful and experimental works.
In 2002, his son Jens Ehrhardt founded the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung in Berlin, which keeps his work alive through exhibitions and publications. In October 2025, the foundation stone was laid for the Ehrhardt Museum in Plüschow, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kéré.