“I wanted to travel, see and experience. What better profession could there be than the one of a photographer, almost a painter in a hurry, overwhelmed by too many constantly changing impressions?”
– Ernst Haas
Rock Mountain, August 1977, Spider Rock in the Canyon de Chelly, Arizona
Born in Austria, Ernst Haas (March 2, 1921 – September 12, 1986) moved to the US in 1951. He photographed America in the hills and in the towns. “Photography,” he said “is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.”
His colour-saturated shots of the US are in a new book Ernst Haas: The American West.
TV Set And Shadows in California, circa 1975.
Wild horses
Western USA, circa 1960. ‘
“I never really wanted to be a photographer. It slowly grew out of the compromise of a boy who desired to combine two goals—explorer or painter. I wanted to travel, see and experience. What better profession could there be than the one of a photographer, almost a painter in a hurry, overwhelmed by too many constantly changing impressions? But all my inspirational influences came much more from all the arts than from photo magazines.”
– Ernst Haas
Buffalo in Yellowstone national park, 1966
New Mexico, circa 1960.
“Every one of us wants to take beautiful, striking, extraordinary pictures. Every one of us is struggling with his own style. Changes don’t come purely by will power alone, but they never come by being satisfied. Let us be more critical with each other: it will bring us closer. Let us find a new common denominator in the struggle, not to follow our own standards of invention. Don’t cover—discover.”
– Ernst Haas
Seattle, Washington, 1975.
Route 66 Albuquerque, New Mexico
“To express dynamic motion through a static moment became for me limited and unsatisfactory,” he said. “The basic idea was to liberate myself from this old concept and arrive at an image in which the spectator could feel the beauty of a fourth dimension, which lies much more between moments than within a moment. In music one remembers never one tone, but a melody, a theme, a movement. In dance, never a moment, but again the beauty of a movement in time and space”
– Ernst Haas
Flood Lands, Monument Valley, a Navajo reservation., 1963
Nevada, 1960
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