|
Biow, Hermann
(b Breslau, ?1803/4; d Dresden, 20 Feb 1850). German photographer. Son of the painter Raphael Biow (1771–1836), he was initially a painter, lithographer and writer. He opened the first photographic studio in Hamburg in 1841 and worked with Carl Ferdinand Stelzner from 1842 to 1843. A series of 46 daguerreotypes (3 extant) of the Great Fire of Hamburg in 1842 has been attributed to Biow (Kaufhold, 1989) and forms an early example of photographic reportage. Travelling to cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Dresden, he took portraits of the famous, including Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Alexander von Humboldt (1847) and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia (all Hamburg, Mus. Kst. & Gew.). In 1848 he photographed the members of the Frankfurt National Assembly for his portfolio work Deutsche National-Gallerie, containing lithographic reproductions of his daguerreotypes. Kempe describes Biow as the ‘first photographer to collect people’. The essential quality of his photographs is their monumental unity. He used larger formats than other daguerreotypists; his plate size ranged from 216*162 mm to 270*320 mm.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
