RENGER-PATZSCH, ALBERT

born June 22, 1897, Wrzburg, Bavaria died Sept. 27, 1966, Wamel Dorf, ber Soest, W.Ger. German photographer whose works showed his desire to treat photography as a medium in its own right. He espoused straight photography, rejecting both the romanticism of the photographers who tried to imitate painting and the photography that tried to gain its effects through startling techniques. His book Die Welt ist schn (1928; The World Is Beautiful) was closely related to the movement known as the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), a term initially applied to a group of German painters whose detached and literal rendering of reality was so extreme that it produced an eerie effect, which is known in the United States as Magic Realism. Renger-Patzsch photographed landscapes, forests, and industrial subjects in a straightforward way but went far beyond simple documentation. His later subjects included landscapes, trees, and stones.