Andreas Feininger (1906-1999) was a German-American photographer best known for his nearly two decades at LIFE magazine, his Manhattan skyline images, and a shelf of instructional photography books that are still worth their weight half a century after publication.
The Career in Brief
Feininger trained as an architect at the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy before turning to photography in the 1930s. He fled Nazi Europe in 1939, settled in New York, and joined LIFE magazine in 1943, where he stayed until 1962 and produced the bulk of his enduring work.
His architectural training shaped everything he did. He saw the city the way an engineer sees a structure: lines, masses, repetition, the geometry underneath the surface. His Manhattan skyline images, his industrial photographs, and his extreme telephoto compressions all came out of that same way of looking.
The Photograph You Have Probably Seen
The Photojournalist (1951), Feininger’s portrait of fellow LIFE photographer Dennis Stock holding a Leica IIIc up to his face, became one of the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century. It captures the act of seeing itself: a man whose entire visible identity has been replaced by a camera. The image still anchors most discussions of what a photographer is.
The Books That Outlived Him
Feininger wrote more than 30 books on photography. Several remain in print and still teach beginners better than most contemporary alternatives:
- The Complete Photographer (1965, expanded multiple times) is a working photographer’s reference covering technique, equipment, and aesthetics. Out-of-date on gear specifics but timeless on seeing.
- Total Picture Control (1970) lays out his philosophy of deliberate, technically rigorous craft.
- The Perfect Photograph and Principles of Composition in Photography compress his Bauhaus-trained eye into accessible teaching.
Pick up any of them at a used bookstore for the price of lunch and you have a serious photography education on your shelf.
His Distinctive Approach
- Telephoto compression. He famously used long lenses, sometimes built himself, to compress New York skylines into stacked geometric layers. His 1942 image of the Brooklyn-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, shot from miles away with an extreme telephoto, is foundational compression work.
- High contrast with deep tonal range. Feininger printed for impact. Blacks were black; whites were white; the gradation between them was scientifically precise.
- Pattern and repetition. Bauhaus geometry visible in nearly every frame. He saw rhythm where others saw mess.
- Industrial and natural form treated identically. A skyscraper, a seashell, and a tree branch all become studies in structure under his lens.
Common Mistakes When Studying His Work
- Reading him as a city photographer only. His shells, insects, and macro nature studies are equally important and reveal the underlying eye more clearly than the famous skyline shots.
- Skipping his books because they are old. His technique advice on specific film stocks and chemistries is dated. His composition and philosophy chapters are not.
- Copying his telephoto compressions without his eye. Long-lens skyline shots are easy to make and hard to make well. He chose the moment and the angle as carefully as he chose the lens.
Try This
Pick a busy urban view (a freeway, a row of buildings, a port) and shoot it at three focal lengths: a wide angle that gives context, a normal lens that records what the eye sees, and the longest telephoto you have that compresses the layers into a single stack. Compare the three. Notice which one says the most about the subject. Feininger spent a career making the case that the third version, the compressed one, is often the most revealing. The exercise teaches you why.
FAQ
Was Andreas Feininger related to Lyonel Feininger? Yes. Lyonel Feininger, the Bauhaus painter, was Andreas’s father. Andreas absorbed his father’s modernist sensibility and translated it into the photographic medium.
Did Feininger work in colour? Mostly black and white, particularly for his iconic LIFE-era work. He did shoot colour throughout his career but his enduring reputation rests on the black-and-white photographs.
What gear did he use? A range, but he was an enthusiastic user of large-format and medium-format cameras and built several of his own ultra-telephoto lenses. His emphasis was always on matching the tool to the image, not on any particular brand or system.
Where can I see his prints? The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the International Center of Photography, and various European museums hold his work. LIFE magazine archives are also a deep resource for his published photographs.
Is his approach still relevant for digital photographers? Yes. His ideas about composition, geometry, and precise technical control translate directly to digital. The tools changed; the seeing did not.
Related Reading
- Black and white photography guide.
- Architectural photography: the genre his Bauhaus training prepared him for.
- Focal length and the compression effect he made famous.
- More masters of photography.