[The Guardian] The big picture: shadow play in 1930s Germany

The big picture: shadow play in 1930s Germany

Paul Wolff’s 1930s images of a tennis match in silhouette have a graceful life of their own

In 1930, Dr Paul Wolff took a series of pictures of tennis players’ shadows for the German magazine Die Dame. The pictures captured a whole tennis match in silhouette – serve, return, volley, forehand, backhand – so that the shadows advancing on the court took on a graceful life of their own, tethered to the ankles and feet of young men and women in ankle socks and white plimsolls. The relation of player and shadow – high summer’s constant doubles partners – has become a familiar theme for sports photographers, but Wolff was among the first to celebrate it.

In the decade that followed, the German photographer and his assistant-cum-stage manager Alfred Tritschler became famous as “the masters of the Leica”, extending the range and scope of the pioneering hand-held camera, with work showcased in every major magazine and newspaper. The Leica company, which had given the former medical doctor one of its prototype 35mm cameras to experiment with in 1926, subsequently delivered all of its new lenses to Wolff in advance of release for him to create advertising images. A travelling slideshow of some of the results was watched by hundreds of thousands of people across the world.

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