While, in the theory of painting, the term Concrete Art was introduced as early as 1930, by Theo van Doesburg, the notion of Concrete Photography first appeared in 1967 at galerie actuelle in Berne (Switzerland) on the occasion of a group exhibition with Swiss artists René Mächler, Roger Humbert, Rolf Schroeter and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder. At the same time, a related movement in photography began in Germany and would later find its way into art history as Generative Photography. One practitioner in this field was Herbert W. Franke, a pioneer of computer art, who combined rational physics and mathematics with photographic experiments. His vintage oscillograms from the 1950s and ‘60s are pioneering examples of computer art aesthetics. In them, graphic vibrations - similar to Lissajous figures - were programmed on an analogue computer system and then photographed from the screen of a cathode ray oscillograph.

The philosophical background of the movement was laid out by the German philosopher Max Bense who defined the goal of Generative aesthetics as, “the analysis of art-generating processes into a finite number of constructive steps. Thus, Generative aesthetics concerns definite aesthetics. In the ideal case, it leads to the development of programs that serve to produce aesthetic states with the help of program controlled computers”. Based on this philosophy, Kunsthaus Bielefeld opened the pivotal show Generative Fotografie in 1968 with works by Gottfried Jäger, Hein Gravenhorst, Kilian Breier and Pierre Cordier.

Generative photography articulates the idea of artistic constructivism joined with the numerical programming of apparative systems and can be classified as a form of concrete art. Most emblematic for this mathematical creativity are the “Pinhole Structures” by Gottfried Jäger, which the artist created with a self-constructed multiple pinhole camera obscura and titled using a numeric programming system. The three-part tableaux, shown at Paris Photo this year and containing 22 small black and white images and four large color images, is Jäger’s magnum opus of computer art and was presented at the legendary computer art exhibition “Tendencies 4” in Zagreb in 1969.

Meanwhile Heinrich Heidersberger, who had started in 1953 with what he called Rhythmograms, adapted experimental forms of kinetic op-art - as celebrated in William C. Seitz‘s show The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 - to the medium of photography by building a pendulum machine (“Pendelmaschine”) which helped him to produce three-dimensional light-drawings on negatives. These miraculous figures were highly acclaimed by the film director Jean Cocteau who gave away some of these vintage photographs to his companion Pablo Picasso and claimed „the connection between man and machine“ as being characteristic of their time.

Jäger’s tireless efforts as an artist, curator and theorist led to the establishment of a class for photography at the Werkkunstschule in Bielefeld in 1966 and since then, he and Karl Martin Holzhäuser have continuously taught the theory of Generative photography, their yearly symposiums in Bielefeld now legendary. Importantly, in 1975, they published the manifesto-like compendium Generative Fotografie with a foreword by Herbert W. Franke.