The Architecture of Frederick Romberg through the Lens of Wolfgang Sievers

Publikation: Beiträge in SammelwerkenAufsätze in KonferenzbändenForschungbegutachtet

Authors

I examine the architecture of émigré artist Frederick Romberg (1913-1992) through the lens of émigré photographer, Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007). This multidisciplinary approach of analyzing Romberg’s architecture through the photographs of Wolfgang Sievers serves to better understand Australian migrant art and just as well, the migrant experience and migrant identity. Romberg and Sievers fled the rise of Nazism in Germany and arrived in Australia in 1938, bringing with them the influence of German Modernist traditions. The professional relationship between architect and photographer resulted in a multitude of photographs whose nature of architectural form and designs communicate not just the physical characteristics of buildings, but also the experience of exile, constant artistic interaction, collaboration, and active promotion of modernist aesthetics in Melbourne. Both Romberg’s deliberate use and dependence of Sievers’ Bauhaus-trained trained photographic practice to capture architecture, and likewise, Sievers’ selective photographic captures of Romberg’s Modern architectural forms, provide insight as to what and whom the Modern artist in exile depends on, engages with, and seeks once in a foreign landscape. Focusing on Sievers’ photographs of Romberg’s designs for Stanhill Flats and Newburn flats, the paper contends that documentary photographs further provide a historical reality of the past and architectural practice. The photographs put us, the viewers, in the setting Romberg found himself in and at around the time his buildings were executed; they illuminate the emerging phenomenon of German modernism in Australia …
OriginalspracheEnglisch
TitelInter Photo Arch : International Conference : inter-photography and architecture
HerausgeberRubén Alcolea , Jorge Tárrago Mingo
Anzahl der Seiten10
Band2
ErscheinungsortNavarra
VerlagUniversidad de Navarra
Erscheinungsdatum2017
Seiten44-53
ISBN (Print)8480815191, 9788480815192
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 2017
Extern publiziertJa
Veranstaltunginter: photography and architecture 2016 - Pamplonia, Spanien
Dauer: 02.11.201604.11.2016