Ernst Haas treated colour as the subject, not a coat of paint on top of one. A red sign in a wet window, a bullfighter’s cape smeared across the frame, a city street dissolved into reflections: the pictures work as arrangements of shape and hue before they work as records. For designers who build with colour, crop and rhythm, Ernst Haas offers a clear set of ideas about how to make a photograph read like a painting without leaving the street.
His photographs are still in copyright, and none of the three museum APIs used for this collection (the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art) flags a Haas print as public domain. This guide therefore describes his work in words and the publisher uses a title card. For historic public-domain images to study, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Ernst Haas?
Haas was born in Vienna in 1921, the year given by the Ernst Haas Estate and by most published references, and died in New York in 1986. He came to photography after the Second World War. The Art Institute of Chicago holds one of his early black-and-white pictures, Vienna (1947), a gelatin silver print, from the years when he was photographing his damaged home city.
Published biographies describe his breakthrough as a story about Austrian prisoners of war returning to Vienna in 1947, published as “Homecoming” in the magazine Heute and in Life. The pictures concentrate on the faces of those waiting at the station, and they brought him to the attention of Robert Capa. At Capa’s invitation Haas joined the Magnum Photos cooperative in 1949, the agency founded two years earlier by Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others. He moved to New York in the early 1950s and lived there for the rest of his life. In 1959 he became Magnum’s president. His Magnum colleague Inge Morath, also from Austria, has her own guide.
Images of a Magic City: colour in Life magazine
In 1953 Life published Haas’s colour essay on New York, “Images of a Magic City”, across two issues. The Magnum archive lists Part I in Life vol. 35, no. 11, 14 September 1953, and published accounts describe the essay as running to 24 pages. It was an unusual commission: colour film was still expensive, magazine colour printing was improving, and many curators saw colour as a commercial medium rather than an art.
The Met’s holdings show the kind of pictures that came out of this period, all chromogenic prints: Conversation on Third Avenue (1950s), Venice, Gondolas in Blue Fog (1950s), Sports Car Race (1950s) and Johannesburg Skyline (1950s). The titles alone show his range: a single overheard moment, an atmosphere, a blur of speed, a city seen as a pattern.
Motion and the bullfight pictures
Haas is often remembered for his motion studies, and the bullfight is the clearest example. The Met holds Bullfight (1954) and The Bullfight (1956, printed in the 1960s), both chromogenic prints. In these pictures he used a slow shutter speed, so the cape, the bull and the matador blur into sweeping bands of red, black and gold while a few details stay sharp enough to anchor the eye.
The result looks closer to a gestural painting than to sports reporting. That is the main lesson for designers: blur is not a mistake to hide, it is a way of drawing direction and speed. A sharp point in a field of movement tells the viewer where to look and what is happening, while the blur carries the energy.
Technique: Kodachrome, Leica and dye transfer
According to the Ernst Haas Estate’s biography and other published accounts, Haas worked with a 35mm Leica rangefinder and, once he moved into colour, mostly with Kodachrome slide film, known for dense, saturated colour. To print, he used the dye transfer process whenever he could. Dye transfer builds a colour print from three separate dye matrices, cyan, magenta and yellow, and it was expensive and slow, but it gave the printer close control over each colour’s hue and strength. In the 1950s it was used mainly for advertising.
His visual tools were simple and repeatable:
- Selective focus. A shallow depth of field turns most of the frame into soft colour, with one small area sharp.
- Reflections and glass. Shop windows, puddles and car bodies layer two or three scenes into one flat image.
- Tight crops. He often filled the frame with a fragment, such as a sign, a wall or a patch of water, so the photograph reads as an abstract composition.
- Slow shutter. Movement becomes streaks of colour that guide the eye across the frame.
MoMA, The Creation and later work
From 21 August to 28 October 1962 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Ernst Haas: Color Photography, a ten-year survey of his colour work, according to MoMA’s press release and exhibition record. It was one of the museum’s early exhibitions devoted to one photographer’s colour work, at a time when colour photography was still not widely collected as art.
His book The Creation (1971) turned the same methods to the natural world: water, rock, light, plants and animals sequenced around the biblical story of creation. The book carries the street work’s habits into landscape: close crops, shallow focus and colour fields that fill the page. In 1986, the year of his death, he received the Hasselblad Award. Museums with Haas prints include the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art, whose holdings include Funeral Procession for John Foster Dulles, Washington, D.C. (1959) and a 1981 portrait of the painter Lee Krasner.
What designers can borrow from Ernst Haas
Haas is useful well beyond photography. His habits translate into layout, branding, motion design and colour work.
- Let colour carry the structure. Plan an image or a layout as large fields of colour first, then add detail. If a design still reads when you squint, the colour is doing its job.
- Use one sharp anchor. In a busy or blurred composition, give the eye a single crisp point: a face, a word, a product. Everything else can stay soft.
- Treat blur as direction. In motion graphics or still work, streaks and smears show speed and lead the eye. Use them on purpose and keep their direction consistent across a series.
- Layer through reflection. Transparent overlays, glass textures and double exposures can combine two ideas in one frame, the way a shop window does in his street pictures.
- Crop to abstraction. A tight crop of an ordinary surface can become a background, a pattern or a hero image. Look for colour fields in walls, signs and water.
- Control saturation. Haas chose film and print processes that let him decide how strong each colour should be. In a digital palette, pick one saturated accent and keep the supporting colours quieter. You can sample colours from your own photographs with the image colour picker, and the guide to vintage colour palettes covers mid-century colour schemes.
For a later New York photographer who also built pictures from colour, reflections and window glass, see the guide to Saul Leiter. Haas’s photographs remain in copyright and are licensed through his estate and agents, so study the ideas and make your own images rather than reproducing his.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ernst Haas known for?
He is known for colour photography in the 1950s and 1960s, including the 1953 Life essay “Images of a Magic City” on New York, motion-blurred bullfight pictures, the 1962 MoMA exhibition Ernst Haas: Color Photography and the book The Creation (1971). He was also president of Magnum Photos from 1959.
What camera and film did Ernst Haas use?
Published accounts, including the Ernst Haas Estate’s biography, say he used a 35mm Leica and mostly Kodachrome colour slide film, and that he printed colour work by the dye transfer process whenever possible.
How did Ernst Haas create motion blur?
He used slow shutter speeds on moving subjects, such as the bullfights in the Met’s Bullfight (1954) and The Bullfight (1956), so movement turned into streaks of colour while a few details stayed readable.
Are Ernst Haas photographs public domain?
No. His photographs date from after 1945 and remain in copyright; none is flagged public domain by the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art. Study them in museum collections and books rather than reusing them.
