작품 상세

Vintage silver print 23,2 x 16,5 cm (9.1 x 6.5 in) Photographer's stamp with handwritten order number on the reverse, "Schostal" agency label and various notations in unknown hands on the reverse This tension-filled photograph was created only one year after Paul Wolff acquired his first Leica in 1926, and the same year he founded the successful firm "Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler". Already demonstrating remarkable understanding of spontaneous 35 mm photography, it captures an image of the morning comings and goings in the light-flooded Frankfurt railway station. It is mainly the atmospheric effect of the beams of light falling through the tall windows of the steel construction and the feeling they evoke which make the photograph so attractive. In a place of constant unrest, of arrival and departure, time stands still for a second; a brief moment is frozen in time forever. The dynamic of the light and the movement of the people in the image meet deceleration and standstill, manifested in the central clock with its hands frozen in this position forever and the arrow relentlessly pointing towards it. For Wolff, who was known for his clear visual idiom, sensitively incorporating the principles of New Vision, and for his technical mastery of his Leica, the high contrasts of the play of light and shadow is a recurring subject. Many of his architecture and city photographs derive their attraction from the calculated interplay of light and shadow; most of his motifs were found in Frankfurt, where he had lived since 1919. Together with Tritschler, Wolff was also an active industrial and advertising photographer, was commissioned to do reportage, for example during the 1936 Olympic Games, and explored colour photography extensively from the late 1930s onward.