Feininger, Andreas Bernhard Lyonel

▪ 2000

      French-born American photographer (b. Dec. 27, 1906, Paris, France—d. Feb. 18, 1999, New York, N.Y.), was internationally renowned for his images, especially his dynamic black-and-white scenes of Manhattan. In the 1920s Feininger studied cabinetmaking at the Bauhaus, the innovative German school of design, where his father, the painter Lyonel Feininger, was a teacher. He later studied architecture. Eventually the younger Feininger's interest in photography superseded his pursuit of other arts, although his appreciation for the underlying structure of things was always evident, whether in his cityscapes or his “portraits” of natural objects like shells, rocks, and trees. After five years in Sweden, where he headed a firm specializing in architectural and industrial photography, Feininger immigrated in 1939 to the U.S. He established himself as a freelance photographer and in 1943 joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962. Feininger had a reputation as a perfectionist and a master technician. When he could not get the kind of equipment he wanted—say, a special telephoto lens or close-up camera—he built it himself. A respected writer on photographic technique, he was for many years a regular contributor to Modern Photography magazine. His books on technique include Feininger on Photography (1949), The Complete Photographer (1965), and Total Photography (1982). Though he traveled the globe, Feininger's best-known photographs celebrated the sights of his adoptive city—traffic on Fifth Avenue, the bright lights of Broadway, and Sunday crowds at Coney Island. Many volumes of his collected photographs were published, among them The Face of New York (1954), Changing America (1955), The World Through My Eyes: 30 Years of Photography (1963), and Forms of Nature and Life (1966).

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