Hugo Erfurth; portrait study in the landscape (Annemarie Erfurth); paper; gum print; image size: height: 26;3 cm; width: 21;6 cm; signed: recto u. li.: in lead: Hugo Erfurth 1912; inscribed: verso u. li. : in lead: E; next to it in purple colored pencil gum print; portrait photography; portrait; girl; meadow; pasture; flowers; half profile (three-quarter view); folk costume; regional costume; artist and his family; At the beginning of the 20th century Hugo Erfurth is; next to Rudolph D黨rkoop and Nicola Perscheid; one of the most famous professional photographers in Germany. After completing an apprenticeship as a photographer; he opened his own studio in Dresden at the age of only 22. Soon Erfurth orientated himself towards the up-and-coming pictorialist photography; participated in numerous amateur photographic exhibitions from 1894 onwards and managed to make a name for himself both as an artistically ennobled amateur and successful professional photographer. Portraits are central to his work; which he began taking in 1906 in his new studio; a classicist palace; in a stylishly elegant ambience; appealing to the wealthy bourgeoisie. He also produced numerous portraits of famous personalities; including K鋞he Kollwitz; Otto Dix and Joachim Ringelnatz. While his studies around 1905 still show full-length figures depicted in an atmospheric way; from the 1920s onward the focus is on the face; which is photographed against a simple monochrome background. Here; his pictorial approach corresponds to the portrait of classical modernism; whereby the technique of oil printing emphasizes the softness and materiality of the pigments and at the same time places the portraits in the art-photographic tradition. Erfurth is a co-founder of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (1919); teaches at the Leipzig Academy and moves from Dresden to Cologne in the 1930s; where he builds up an art collection. After his Cologne studio and archive were destroyed in the Second World War; E