Hugo Erfurth

Hugo Erfurth began an apprenticeship with the court photographer Wilhelm Höffert in Dresden in 1895. He took over the studio J. S. Schröder in the Dresden Johannstadt in 1896 at the age of 22 years. In 1906 he acquired the Palais Lüttichau in Dresden, where he set up the Erfurth photo studio. Until the First World War, he also taught a class for photography at the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Trade in Leipzig under Professor Walter Tiemann. In 1934 he moved to Cologne and opened a studio there, which was destroyed in 1942 during the bombing of Cologne. He settled at Lake Constance after the war and died there in 1948 at the age of 73 years.

At the turn of the century, he cultivated a pictorial-impressionist style of photography. Prints were often made as precious oil pigment prints. However, Hugo Erfurth became known primarily through his portrait photographs, in which he realized a very personal, psychologizing view of the character of the person portrayed in the 1920s. The models required for such a presentation were found by Erfurth, in particular, among artists or writers, such as Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, Gerhart Hauptmann or Oskar Kokoschka. Erfurth also became known as a theater photographer and even more for his photographs of modern artistic dance. Hugo Erfurth is one of the co-founders of the Gesellschaft deutscher Lichtbildner, the oldest organization of photographers in Germany.