Dr Christopher Webster van Tonder has secured funding from the ArtsFund and ACE/V&A Purchase Grant Fund to add 75 vintage photographs by the German photographer Hans Saebens (born Bremen 1895, died Worpswede 1969) to the School of Art Collection.
Saebens was a painter, graphic artist and photographer who specialised in photographs of Northern Germany and its people. Like many of his contemporaries who focussed on the landscape and the peasant, Saebens work was regarded by the National Socialist political establishment as a ‘propaganda asset’ although Saebens himself was never a member of the party. Despite the fact that he has all but disappeared from the history of photography, Saebens was highly regarded and his work was reproduced in many journals and books in the late 1930s and through the 1940s.
The acquisition of this collection of photographs by Saebens significantly enhances the photographic portfolio of the existing collection in relation to the ideological uses of photography under totalitarian regimes, the central focus of the research of Dr. Webster van Tonder who will be curating an exhibition and catalogue of this work in the year ahead.
Purchased with the assistance of the ArtFund and the Arts Council of England/Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund
For more information on Christopher Webster van Tonder’s research visit:
Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum & Galleries 