When Wolfgang Sievers was a young man in Germany, just before he emigrated to Australia, he studied at an art & design school in Berlin, the Contempora (Contempora—Lehrateliers für neue Werkkunst).

Sievers spoke warmly about his experience there, saying it was the most intense education he ever had. He liked its practicality: following classes in the morning the school turned into a professional studio in the afternoon, and students worked on real commercial jobs. Sievers himself was often put in charge, and was offered a teaching position when he decided to emigrate to Australia.

The school lasted only a few years, from 1932 to 1939, at the start of World War II. You can imagine the difficulty of running an education business in that turbulent era in Nazi Germany. Its founder was a prominent architect, Fritz August Brehaus, but the man in charge of the photography department was Erich Balg (1904-77) a prominent photographer in Germany for many years.

Balg worked for the fashionable Atelier Binder in Berlin before helping Brehaus establish the Contempora. He survived the war and continued as a commercial photographer in Hamburg into the 1960s. His photographs are documented at www.erich-balg.de. and show his evolution from dark moody Pictorialism in the 1920s through to clinical commercial photography in the 1950s and 60s. I prefer the warmth of his earlier work.