Otto ArnoldVon Siegen aus – Fotografische Streifzüge durch Kulturlandschaft und Arbeitswelt

Otto Arnold, the pioneer of photography from the Siegerland! In 1905 Otto Arnold (1881–1944) came to Siegen as a teacher, later becoming headmaster of the Nordschule and of the Sieghütter Hauptschule. In the mid-1920s he bought a Zeiss Ikon plate camera and embarked on an extensive photographic documentation of the Siegerland. On numerous excursions – on foot, by bus or train, with his family or with friends, with colleagues as well as with his school classes – he pursued with great intensity the connections between landscape and labour. His photographs tell of the Haubergswirtschaft, a sustainable form of communal woodland management, of tanning and charcoal burning, of work in the mines and ironworks and in industry, and of home working in textile production. He was driven by a pedagogical aim, for he used the photographs for slide projections in his lessons in order to bring regional life home to his pupils. Today his photographic archive traces a unique picture of the Siegerland in transition during the 1920s and 1930s. Otto Arnold’s work was first examined and exhibited by his daughter-in-law and his grandson in the 1980s. Forty years later, the exhibition of 2024 marking the 800th anniversary of the city of Siegen again focuses on Otto Arnold’s view of the people, the architecture and the landscape and of their connections with traditional as well as industrial working processes. The texts for the book “Von Siegen aus – Photographische Streifzüge durch Kulturlandschaft und Arbeitswelt” were compiled and edited by Eva Schmidt; they include contributions by Dieter Pfau, historian of the Siegerland, who investigates Otto Arnold’s motifs, by Joseph Imorde, professor of art history at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin, who writes about Arnold’s picture series and about the medium of photography in the teaching of the 1920s and 1930s, by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, director of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Köln, who ventures a comparison between Otto Arnold and contemporaries such as August Sander, and by the editor herself, who talks to Detlev Arnold about the history of his grandfather’s archive.

Exhibition:
Städtische Galerie Haus Seel, Siegen, 11/7 – 25/8/2024