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Erich Retzlaff (born Reinfeld, Germany 1899, died Dießen am Ammersee, Bavaria, Germany, 1993) was a German photographer who focused primarily on portraits of workers, farmers, peasants and peasant costumes. ==Early career== Retzlaff served as a machine gunner in the First World War, seeing action and being wounded on the Western Front, Flanders. During the war he received the Iron Cross (second class). After a series of false starts in civilian life after the war, Retzlaff became involved with photography in the mid to late 1920s starting with a small studio on the Königsallee (Düsseldorf) and then moving to larger premises as his business grew. Between 1928 and 1929 Retzlaff worked on a project that would become his first book ''Das Antlitz Des Alters'' (Face of Age ) (1930). The Quarterly Review of Biology commented in 1931: "The viewpoint and the purpose of this beautiful volume are literary and artistic rather than scientific. The superb portraits of some 35 old men and women will, however, be of interest and use to students of human senescence, senility, and longevity."〔The Quarterly Review of Biology. Vol.6, No.4, , Chicago, December, 1931, 476.〕 The book cemented a reputation for Retzlaff as an ‘art’ photographer and in a short space of time he went on to produce two further book projects composed primarily of portraits of Germans at work both on the land and in industry; ''Die von der Scholle'' (who till the soil ) (1931) and ''Menschen am Werk'' (at work ) (1931). When the National Socialists were elected to power in Germany in 1933, Retzlaff was already considered something of a pioneer in his photographic output with regards depictions of the German peasant and proletariat. A reviewer of Retzlaff’s book ''Die von der Scholle'', writing for the University of Oklahoma’s Books Abroad, observed in 1932: "The art-photographer Erich Retzlaff has assembled two volumes of large full-page photographs which are grippingly real and at the same time strikingly unusual…They are wholesome average members of the laboring classes…presented in their everyday appearance…these collections are both striking and edifying."〔R.T.H. 'Books Abroad', University of Oklahoma, Vol. 6, No. 2, April, 1932, 228.〕 Impressed by these earlier photographic studies of German ‘Volkdom’, and to coincide with the year of their coming to power, the National Socialists employed Retzlaff to produce portraits of party notables such as Rudolf Hess, Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Röhm; to be published in a special edition ''Wegbereiter und Vorkämpfer für das neue Deutschland'' (and champions of the new Germany ) (1933). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Erich Retzlaff」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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