Ernst Fuhrmann

1886–1956

Ernst Fuhrmann was in the export trade before becoming head of the ethnological department of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen in 1920. The following year he founded the Folkwang-Auriga publishing house devoted mainly to photographic books about nature, flora, and folklore. He employed Albert Renger-Patzsch and Lotte Jacobi among others and published photos of plants and macrophotography in the books Die Welt der Pflanze (Volumes 1-4, 1924–1931) and Die Pflanze als Lebewesen (1930). After the publishing house was closed in 1933 by the National Socialist regime, he continued the photo archive as the Folkwang-Archiv in Berlin. He emigrated to the US in 1938.