Ottomar Anschütz

Anschütz, Ottomar (1846-1907), German photographer and inventor. The son of a decorative painter, Anschütz learned photography from Franz Hanfstaengl and others in Munich before returning to Lissa in Poznań (today Lescnow, Poland) in 1868 to establish a studio. In 1882 he developed a practical focal-plane shutter, often taking long series of pictures that recorded a complete activity in a manner usually identified with the 35 mm photographers of the mid-20th century. Memorable pictures of storks established his European reputation, and from 1885 he made multiple-plate chronophotographs of up to 24 sequential images of horses and riders, later also of other animals and gymnasts. In late 1886 he devised his first ‘Schnellseher’ (known also as the Electrical Tachyscope) to reproduce the movements captured by his chronophotographs, and over the next decade c.170 machines were made, and exhibited throughout Europe and North America. His undercapitalized exhibition business, the Electrical Wonder Co. of London, failed in 1893 and Anschütz returned to still photography, designing several influential hand cameras made and sold by C. P. Goerz & Co. of Berlin into the 1920s. He also taught photography to the family of Emperor Wilhelm II, and supported amateur photography at an extensive Berlin studio. He was the first photographer admitted to the annual Berlin Art Exhibition (1899). But his reputation was eclipsed by the coming of modernism, and by the 1920s he was barely remembered.

— Deac Rossell

Bibliography

• Rossell, D., Faszination der Bewegung: Ottomar Anschütz zwischen Photographie und Kino (2001)