Born 1922 in Munich, Germany, Erich Hartmann was sixteen when he came with his family in 1938 to Albany, New York, refugees from Nazi Germany. The only English speaker in the family, he worked in a textile mill, attending evening high school and later taking night courses at Siena College.
When the U. S. entered the Second World War he enlisted in the U.S. army, trained in Virginia and at Ohio State University, served in England and during the invasion of Normandy as well as in battles across Europe. At the war’s end he was assigned as court interpreter at Nazi trials in Cologne.
In early 1946 he came to New York City where he worked as an assistant to a portrait photographer and then as a freelancer. His portrait subjects over the years included Walter Gropius, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Koestler, Rachel Carson, Marcel Marceau, Gidon Kremer and many other literary and musical personalities.
Hartmann was invited to join Magnum Photos in 1952. From 1967 to ’86 he was on the board of directors and he served as president in 1985 and ’86.
Hartmann first became known to the wider public through his work for Fortune magazine in the 1950s. His poetic approach to science, industry and architecture shone through the photo essays “Shapes of Sound”, “The Building of Saint Lawrence Seaway”, and “The Deep North.” He later did similar essays on the poetics of science and technology for French, German and American Geo and other magazines.
He traveled extensively, dividing his time between editorial assignments for publications worldwide, and annual reports for IBM, Boeing, RCA, Mead Paper Co., Ford Motor Company, Citroën, Citicorp, Schlumberger, Steuben Glass, All-Nippon Airways, Kimberly Clark, Pillsbury, The European Space Research Organization and numerous others. His editorial work included major features on art, travel, architecture, music, technology, science and industry for magazines in the United States, Europe and Japan. During the Vietnam War he traveled to Saigon with representatives of the Fellowship of Reconciliation to meet with South Vietnamese peace activists.
Over the years he was a lecturer at the Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria. He also taught at the Syracuse University School of Journalism, the University of Maryland, the “Design and Content” series at New York University and participated in many photographic symposia and workshops in the U.S. and Europe. He was the recipient of numerous prizes, awards and citations including the Photokina Award, Cologne, Germany, International Award from CRAF, Italy, the Newhouse Citation in Photography, medals and awards from Art Directors’ Clubs.
Hartmann’s principal interest, in photography and in life, was the way in which people relate to their natural surroundings and to the environments that they have created. He documented not only industry and high technology–glass-making, aviation, agriculture and food production, scientific research, space exploration, construction, information processing–but also the human cultural and geographical context: Shakespeare’s England; James Joyce’s Dublin, Thomas Mann’s Venice, a U.S. presidential election, train travel through Europe, musicians and music-making wherever he traveled.
His personal projects reveal a fascination with the beauty embodied in technology: the abstract patterns of ink drops in water, laser light in natural and man-made environments, intimate portraits of precision-manufactured components. His most penetrating and poignant work explores the emptiness that can lie within the world human beings make for themselves: a mannequin factory crowded with inanimate yet suffering faces; the alienation of the modern workplace; and the mute, horrifying remains of the Nazi concentration camps.
Erich Hartmann was married for 52 years to Ruth Bains; she, their son, Nicholas Hartmann, daughter, Celia Hartmann, and granddaughters Emily and Alice Garfield survive him. He died 1999 in New York City.