Ernst Haas

(American/Austrian, 1921–1986)

Ernst Haas was an influential American-Austrian photographer known for producing color photos during a time when it was considered inferior to black-and-white. His innovative use of shutter speed added a blurred effect to his images, creating a unique sense of movement. “Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view,” he once said. Born on March 2, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, he went on to attend the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt and purchased his first camera in 1946. Working as a staff photographer for Heute magazine, he won acclaim for his photo essay about prisoners of war coming home to Vienna. This series of photos led Robert Capa to offer Haas a position at Magnum Photos in 1949. He moved to New York in 1950, and two years later hitchhiked across the United States, producing his first photo essay for LIFE magazine. His experience working on John Huston’s film The Bible (1966), spurred Haas’s production of the seminal 1971 photobook The Creation. In the years that followed, the artist continued to photograph locations across the globe. He died on September 12, 1986 in New York, NY. Today, Haas’s photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Museum Modern Kunst in Vienna, among others.