Description

Hurrying travellers in Grand Central Station, New York City. 1976.

Photographs should be symbolic rather than descriptive...they should suggest to the reader an internal rather than an external part of life

Erich Hartmann
© Erich Hartmann | Magnum Photos

Erich Hartmann was 16-years-old when he went with his family in 1938 to Albany, New York, as a refugee from Nazi Germany.

The only English speaker in the family, he worked in a textile mill, attending evening high school and later taking night courses at Siena College. At the end of the war, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an assistant to a portrait photographer and then as a freelancer.

Throughout his career, he pursued many long-term personal projects, and photographic interpretations with literary echoes. In his later years, he photographed the remains of the Nazi concentration camps, resulting in a book and exhibition, In the Camps. At the time of his death, he was engaged in a photo project, he called Music Everywhere.

© Erich Hartmann | Magnum Photos

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