In 1930, Dr Paul Wolff took a series of pictures of tennis players’ shadows for the German magazine Die Dame. The pictures captured a whole tennis match in silhouette – serve, return, volley, forehand, backhand – so that the shadows advancing on the court took on a graceful life of their own, tethered to the ankles and feet of young men and women in ankle socks and white plimsolls. The relation of player and shadow – high summer’s constant doubles partners – has become a familiar theme for sports photographers, but Wolff was among the first to celebrate it.
In the decade that followed, the German photographer and his assistant-cum-stage manager Alfred Tritschler became famous as “the masters of the Leica”, extending the range and scope of the pioneering hand-held camera, with work showcased in every major magazine and newspaper. The Leica company, which had given the former medical doctor one of its prototype 35mm cameras to experiment with in 1926, subsequently delivered all of its new lenses to Wolff in advance of release for him to create advertising images. A travelling slideshow of some of the results was watched by hundreds of thousands of people across the world.
All of Wolff’s technical mastery coincided, of course, with the darkest days in his country’s history. Almost accidentally, he documented in his pin-sharp, perfectly lit way the end of the Weimar republic, the rise of nazism and the devastation of war. Wolff’s house in Frankfurt and his extensive personal archive were destroyed by bombing in 1944. A selection of the prints and negatives that remain has been collected into a book that includes not only his photographs of tennis players, but also early images of Hitler Youth, the launch of the Hindenburg zeppelin and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Not for nothing is the book called Light and Shadow.
Dr Paul Wolff & Tritschler: Light and Shadow – Photographs 1920 to 1950, edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle (Kehrer Verlag), has been nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz 2020 Photography Book award. The winners will be announced next month
