Factory Smokestack, ca. 1925
Gelatin silver print
23.3 x 17.1 cm (9-3/16 x 6-3/4 in.)
84.XM.138.23

At the outset of his career in the early 1920s, Renger-Patzsch was fascinated by the duality of nature and the machine. The same years in America found the concepts mdchine and nature expressed like a mantra in the work of some of the very best photographers, most notably Paul Strand and Edward Weston (related to-->>187,188). Paul Strand became obsessed with the highly precise forms of his Ackeley motion-picture camera and the lathes used to manu- facture it, while also being fascinated by plants and rocks. In 1922, Weston, on his way from Los Angeles to New York, stopped for a few days in Middletown, Ohio, where he studied the interaction of meandering ventilation pipes and the adjacent geometric architectural forms. In Germany, Renger-Patzsch was totally in tune with the spirit of such experimental attitudes, which by 1927 Ied him to formulate a credo to express his position: "The secret of a good photograph . . . resides in its realism . . . [its] rigid linear structure-only photography is capable of that-. . . the mechanical reproduction of form-is what makes [photogra- phy] superior to all other means of expression."
(ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCH related to-->> 179)

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