FISH. VEGETABLES. SECURITIES. Fide Struck photographed Hamburg 1930-33

Altona Museum
January 21 to April 11, 2020

Having been rediscovered in an old wooden suitcase in 2015, the work of this self-taught, working-class photographer is now being presented for the first time in an exhibition by the Altona Museum in collaboration with the F.C. Gundlach Foundation. Struck's complete oeuvre will soon be incorporated into the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation's image archive (bpk-Bildagentur).

Between 1930 and 1933, Fide Struck primarily photographed the work in the port, the fish auction hall, and the fish smokehouses in Hamburg and Altona, as well as the farmers at the vegetable market near the Deichtorhallen, and finally the trading at the Hamburg Stock Exchange. His photographs are striking for their starkness, reflecting the style of "New Objectivity" and "New Vision," but also possess a political dimension in their empathy for the world of ordinary workers and farmers.

Under the Nazi regime, this socially critical, worker-focused photography became increasingly dangerous. Struck concentrated more and more on apolitical subjects; after 1934, he photographed only his family. He kept the glass negatives of his work in a wooden suitcase, which accompanied him through the turmoil of the Second World War and the postwar period, from Berlin to Hamburg, then to Stuttgart, and finally back to Berlin. There, the suitcase lay in a cellar for decades until Fide's son, Thomas Struck, discovered and examined its historically spectacular contents in 2015.

Fide Struck's biography was initially shaped by his enthusiasm for the youth movement and the ideals of the life reform movement of the 1920s. From 1924, he learned photography in Gildenhall, a community of artisans in northern Brandenburg influenced by the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus. When this community dissolved in 1929, Struck had a stroke of luck amidst the Great Depression. As a photographer for a housing association, he documented their construction activities and was able to earn a living this way. Alongside this, he worked freelance, producing numerous photojournalistic reports in which, as a working-class photographer, he captured the everyday lives of people in factories, markets, and on the streets.

Struck's rediscovered photographs, with their outstanding photographic quality and excellent state of preservation, are a small treasure trove. They bear witness to the visual development of photography between 1918 and 1933 and offer a unique glimpse into the lives and work of people in Hamburg and Altona in the late 1920s.

An exhibition by the Altona Museum in collaboration with the F.C. Gundlach Foundation

Hamburg Historical Museums Foundation
Altona Museum
Museumsstr. 23
22765 Hamburg

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