IMPORTANT GERMAN PHOTOBOOK - with the SCARCE AND COMPLETE (!) ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET. Sought-after photobook classic and famous Dr. Paul Wolff title - in the SCARCE FIRST PRINTING (there were many later ones). Mentioned here: - Manfred Heiting, Kristina Lemke, Dr. Paul Wolff and Alfred Tritschler, The Printed Images 1906-2019 - Michael Koetzle, Dr. Paul Wolff and Tritschler, Light and Shadow, Photographs 1920-1950 - Manfred Heiting, Roland Jäger, Autopsie 2, page 468/469. Breidenstein Verlagsgesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main. 1942. First edition, first printing. Hardcover with dustjacket. 240 x 275 mm. 110 pages with 54 color photos by Dr. Paul Wolff. 58 pages with text. Introduction: Heiner Kurzbein. Text: Prof. Dr. Emil Preetorius, Hanns Geißler, Dr. A. Schilling. Text in German. Condition: Book inside and outside fresh and flawless; clean with no marks and with no foxing. Dustjacket still impressive and still complete with no missing parts; several tears, partly strongly taped from behind. Overall fine condition. Famous Dr. Paul Wolff title in the scarce first printing - with the SCARCE AND COMPLETE ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET. "Paul Wolff (1887-1951) was a German photographer and a pioneer in the field of 35mm photography. In recognition of his photographic achievements as a pioneer of Leica photography, he received the two hundred thousandth Leica from the Ernst Leitz company in 1936. As a twelve-year-old, he was already enthusiastic about taking photographs with a plate camera. However, after leaving school, he first studied medicine, qualified as a doctor in Strasbourg in 1914, became an assistant doctor and was called up for military service in 1914. After the First World War, he was expelled from Strasbourg, which now belonged to France again, in 1919. He moved to Frankfurt am Main. There he initially worked in the copying plant of a financially weak film company. Using a film camera he had bought himself, he initially began to work on commissions for the film company, but soon became self-employed. He produced films and photographed the housing estates for the New Frankfurt project. Paul Wolff switched from moving images back to photography. He worked with an 18 × 24 cm plate camera and had plenty of commissions. In 1926, he won his first Leica at the International Photo Exhibition in Frankfurt: it was to have a lasting influence on the rest of his life. Initially, he used the Leica to take "incidental" photos of small, pleasant scenes at markets, in alleyways and along paths after his work with the large-format camera was done. He improved his technique and soon caused a sensation in the magazines with his lively 35mm photos. The dynamic style of the unleashed 35mm camera was born. In 1927, he was looking for the ideal collaborator and found him in his business partner Alfred Tritschler. The two then founded the company Dr Paul Wolff & Tritschler in Frankfurt am Main. Paul Wolff's breakthrough as a photographer came in 1933, when the Leitz company ordered 100 enlargements in 40 × 60 cm format from him for the exhibition Die Kamera, which subsequently travelled around the world as a touring exhibition. The first edition of Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica was published in 1934. Translated into four languages, this book became one of the standard works of photography. In the same year, Paul Wolff travelled to what was then the Saar region. On this occasion, he took gripping pictures of people, everyday life, landscapes and industrial plants such as the Völklingen Ironworks. In 1936, Paul Wolff and his colleague Alfred Tritschler photographed the Summer Olympics and subsequently published the book Was ich bei den Olympischen Spielen 1936 sah, which appeared in four languages. Wolff not only photographed with the Leica, but also continued to use large-format cameras, preferably in 9 × 12 cm format with a Schneider Angulon 120 mm wide-angle lens for outdoor shots. In 1940, Paul Wolff published the first German industrial photo book in colour. Im Kraftfeld von Rüsselsheim was published with a print run of 55,000 copies; in the same year he published the first edition of Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica in colour. In 1944, his house in Frankfurt was destroyed in a bombing raid and large parts of his archive of plate images were destroyed; only the archive of small images, which had been stored away, survived. The Frankfurt Institute for City History preserves an extensive collection of photographs taken between 1927 and 1943 of Frankfurt's historic city centre, which was destroyed in 1944. In 1949-50, he photographed the illustrated book Deutschland - ein Bildband von deutscher Landschaft, ihren Städten, Dörfern und Menschen for the Umschau publishing house, in which Alsfeld is shown, among other places. After his death, his co-managing director Alfred Tritschler continued to run the Dr Paul Wolff & Tritschler picture archive. In 1963, it was taken over by Alfred Tritschler's nephew, Robert Sommer in Offenburg, who continued to run it successfully and handed it over to his son Thomas Sommer in 1979. Today, the photo archive covers the period from 1927 to 1970 and has a stock of around 500,000 negatives. Wolff's grave is located in Frankfurt's main cemetery, Gewann II GG 17a. Paul Wolff's first marriage was to Helene Dörr (1887-1959). Their son Klaus Heinrich Wolff was born in Strasbourg on 1 May 1916 (died 1988). Wolff's second son Stephan Wolff (born 1943) was the result of a second marriage to Annette Beiger (1906-2002). Wolff had a warm friendship with the designer of the Leica, Oscar Barnack. He was also personally connected to the head of Leitzwerke Ernst Leitz. in Königstein i. Ts. in 1929 as part of the Blue Books series, quickly achieved several large print runs. With Wolff's project "botanical photographic studies", which he immediately proposed to the publisher Langewiesche in 1929 and which appeared in 1931 under the title Formen des Lebens (Forms of Life), he consciously engaged with the protagonists of New Vision such as Karl Bloßfeldt, Ernst Fuhrmann and Albert Renger-Patzsch. In his book Sonne über See und Strand (Sun over Sea and Beach), he mainly photographed people and created a beautiful contemporary document of fashion in the 1940s. It is interesting to note that the captions are printed in three languages. Wolff and Tritschler's agency photographs covered a wide range of subjects that catered to mass tastes: from fashion, advertising and still lifes to architectural, industrial and landscape photography, travel reports and sports shots. They used the stylistic devices of New Objectivity, gained experience with the aesthetics of National Socialism and documented bombed-out Frankfurt from a distance." (Wikipedia)