Heinrich Kühn

Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944) was a German-Austrian photographer, writer, and scientist who became one of the most important pioneers of art photography during the Pictorialist era. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1866, Kühn's first use of photography was in microphotography in medical research, in histology and bacteriology at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. His asthmatic condition led him to abandon his job as a doctor and to move to Innsbruck, Austria, where he devoted himself to photography, supported by his family's wealth.

His first influences were from the Vienna Secession and from the Linked Ring, which he joined in 1896, an association that encouraged him to take part in the international exhibition of art photography in Vienna in 1891. He was also strongly affected by his meeting with Hans Watzek at the Wiener Camera-Klub in 1894. Watzek, Hugo Henneberg, and Kühn worked together from 1896 on the multiple gum-bichromate printing technique in order to attain the broadest possible range of tonal values. They exhibited frequently together from 1897 to 1903 as Das Kleeblatt, or "the trefoil," publishing numerous articles on the techniques of artistic representation with which they made a case for photography as a fine art.

Kühn's mature photographs are among the most beautiful examples of Pictorialist practice, characterized by their soft focus, atmospheric printing, and warm domestic subjects, including intimate portraits of his four children and his devoted governess Mary Warner, as well as still lifes, landscapes, and quiet interior scenes. His photographs were widely reproduced in the important international photographic journals of the period, and he corresponded regularly with Alfred Stieglitz, whose Camera Work published his images alongside those of the leading American and European art photographers. Kühn's photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the Albertina in Vienna, and other major international collections, where they remain among the defining images of turn-of-the-century European Pictorialism.