Pamono Heinz von Perckhammer, Chinese Girl Praying, Original Heliogravure, 1928> Art Deco

Heinz von PERCKHAMMER (1895-1965)

Chinese Prostitute praying in Macau

Original Heliogravure / Rotogravure.

Year: 1928

Size (overall): 27 x 19.5 cm

Great Condition

THE MOST IMPORTANT PHOTO FROM THE WHOLE COLLECTION

Baimei Shen is a Chinese god for prostitution and brothels. On her first assignment with a client, a prostitute was supposed to make a sacrifice to him. According to a later tradition, the client was expected to do the same when he first visited a brothel.

Literature: “The Culture of the Nude in China” by Heinz Von Perckhammer, Eigenbrödler-Verlag, Berlin, 1928.

Heinz (Heinrich Josef Anton Alois) von Perckhammer (1895–1965) was a Tyrolean photographer best known for his Chinese nudes and Beijing street scenes.

Born in Merano, Austria-Hungary, on 3 March 1895, in the First World War he served aboard the SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth during the Siege of Tsingtao, and from 1917 to 1919 was a Japanese prisoner of war. He remained in China for several years after his release. In 1928 two volumes of his photographs were published in Berlin: one of carefully posed Chinese nudes, many taken in Macao brothels, under the title Edle Nacktheit in China (The Culture of the Nude in China), and one of Beijing street photography, as Peking. In 1929 he accompanied the airship LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin on its round-the-world tour, as a photojournalist for the Berlin illustrated weekly Die Woche.

By 1932 Perckhammer had established a studio in Berlin, where his work included nudes and fashion photography. His studio in Berlin was bombed out in 1942, and after the war he returned to Merano. He died, aged 69, on 3 February 1965.

A pioneer of nude photography in China, where he took poetic photos of girls in brothels in several cities (China was not open to nude culture like most European countries, and he could not find models elsewhere), he is considered one of the most important photographers of nude in 1920s/1930s, along with Drtikol, Weston and Koppitz.