Christian Staub, Photographer/Artist
Bill Schenley
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/176986_staubobit09.html
In the late 1930s, with fascism threatening to overrun
Europe, Swiss-born Christian Staub didn't like his chances.
Drafted into the army, he thought a Nazi invasion was
inevitable, and the comparatively tiny military forces under
Swiss command would be swept away like dust by a windstorm.
Staub was ready to sacrifice for his country, he said later,
but not to engage in useless and surely fatal heroics. What
to do? Counting on the famously tidy Swiss character, he
peed in his uniform. By the third day of self-soiling, he
was discharged as a free man.
What he lacked as a soldier he possessed as a photographer.
The photos he took while traveling in Europe during and
after the Second World War testify to his courage, his
powers of invention and his endless curiosity about a world
reshaping itself before his eyes.
He died May 30 in Seattle of emphysema.
Anticipating Garry Winogrand by several decades, he
photographed the back of a fascist orator as an enthralled
crowd hung on his every word. Most of Staub's best work has
an eerie quiet, such as a French farmhouse topped with snow.
At first glance, the scene is austerely romantic. Only by
looking closer can you see the swastika lightly etched in
the heavy wood of the farmhouse door.
He photographed marble garden statues covered in cloth,
dolls heads without their faces, and the cramped attic rooms
where Jews might have crept around for years, hoping to
avoid capture. Just the rooms tell the story. Staub pared
narratives to their bones to heighten their evocative
powers.
The great achievement of his early work is little known,
partly because of the artist's personality. He wanted
attention but disdained it when he got it. While he loved
art, he tended to view people with suspicion.
For the last 20 years of his life, he grew progressively
deafer, yet wouldn't wear his hearing aid.
"I think it beeped once," said his wife, Renate. "After that
, no matter what I said, he wouldn't wear it." He spoke
softly in heavily accented English and liked to use his
intelligence to dig holes under the feet of whoever was rash
enough to discuss art, history or literature with him.
Hearty, confident souls who befriended him appreciated his
humor, his generous enthusiasm for the work of other
artists, his loyalty and the rigor of his aesthetic.
After working for an advertising agency in Berlin, he joined
the faculty at the University of Washington in 1967,
teaching photography in the school of architecture.
He retired in 1988 at age 70. In Seattle in the late 1970s,
he exhibited a photographic series featuring night streets
and daytime parking lots. His photos of white doors with
black doorknobs predate Ralph Gibson's photos of similar
material. A never-exhibited series of fat people seen from
the rear will be shown this summer at Bumbershoot in an
exhibit curated by Staub's friend, freelance curator and art
critic Matthew Kangas.
In recent years, interest in Staub's work has grown in
Europe. A retrospective featuring his photos (1942 to 1987)
took place at the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum in Aachen,
Germany, in 1996.
A memorial service will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. June 29 in
the music room of the Faculty Club at the University of
Washington. Staub is survived by his wife of 44 years,
Renate Kaufmann Staub, and their daughter, Alexandra Staub.
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FROM: The Seattle Times ~
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001951752_staubobit09.html
Send in the clowns. Christian Staub, abstract painter and
photographer of texture, light, circuses, sidewalk cracks
and the Bite of Seattle, died of emphysema May 30.
Mr. Staub, 85, taught photography and architecture at the
University of Washington for 21 years, in a career that
spanned the continents with exhibits in Paris, Zurich,
Vienna and Ahmedabad, India. His collections have been shown
in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ludwig
Museum in Cologne, Germany.
"He saw things in a different way than other people," his
wife, Renate Staub, said. "We would walk somewhere in
Seattle, and he was fascinated by parking lots and shadows
of building. I would point out the sunset, and that was of
no interest to him at all. The next day he would set up his
camera at the parking lot and shoot cracks in the sidewalk."
He was born Aug. 1, 1918, and grew up in Menzingen,
Switzerland. The village was so small it didn't have its own
high school, so he went to boarding school. His father, a
veterinarian who treated the livestock in their village,
didn't approve of his son's desire to become an artist - he
thought his son should study something that would provide
money to feed him - but Mr. Staub moved to Paris to pursue
painting anyway. When the Germans invaded France during
World War II, he moved back to Switzerland and studied
photography with Hans Finsler, a leader in the new
objectivity movement.
For a while, Mr. Staub freelanced for magazines, then worked
at a U.S. advertising company. The ad firm had a Swiss
watchmaker client, which allowed him to spend time in
Switzerland to publish two books of photos - one on the
circus and one of village life there. He returned to Germany
after the war to teach at the new Bauhaus school. Grant
Hildebrand, UW professor emeritus, called Mr. Staub's
reputation "brilliant."
Before he came to Seattle, Mr. Staub taught in Ahmedabad,
India, at the National Design Institute. He joined the UW in
1967. His colleague Hildebrand wrote: "Chris was the first
photographer of such stature to become a part of our
faculty."
His wife said he didn't believe he could teach creativity.
"You can teach (them to) ... do the work right," she
recalled him saying. Renate, 67, is a financial specialist
in the department of civil and environmental engineering at
the UW.
She also called him passionate, though he mellowed as he
aged. "He knew what's right, and he followed that," she
said. "There are not too many gray areas (to him), not like
politicians."
After Mr. Staub retired, he worked on exhibits of his
photographs. As one of his last projects, he gave 20 of his
prints of Grock, a man who Renate Staub described as a
"philosopher clown," to a traveling exhibition. A collection
of Mr. Staub's photographs of the Bite of Seattle will be
shown at Bumbershoot this year.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter,
Alexandra Staub, an associate professor at Pennsylvania
State University in State College, Pa.; and his sister,
Paula Muller-Staub, in Switzerland.
A memorial service will be held June 29 at 5 p.m. in the
music room of the University of Washington Faculty Club.