Getty Museum

[Self-Portrait at Typewriter, Prellerstrasse Studio]

Oskar Schlemmer

Date: 1925
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Culture: German
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

This multiple exposure self-portrait of Oscar Schlemmer as a spectral presence in his studio creates a puzzle of numerous layers. His transparent body is much too large to sit at the typewriter before him, although he appears ready to push his chair forward to get to work. As the different exposures blend, stacks of paper and a frame on the desk behind him become the pattern of his vest. Two white-cuffed hands seem to hold up the cabinets in the upper left corner, yet the way in which the corner of the cabinet is visible through the right hand indicates that the hands represent another, separate exposure from those of the studio and photographer. Schlemmer exposed one sheet of film several different times in order to achieve this unlikely blending of forms.

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Creator

Oskar Schlemmer

German Photographer · 1888–1943

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Artist

>[Oskar Schlemmer] transformed into abstract terms of geometry or mechanics his observation of the human figure moving in space. His figures and forms are pure creations of imagination, symbolizing eternal types of human character and their different moods, serene or tragic, funny or serious. So wrote Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School in Germany. Schlemmer joined the staff of the Bauha