Alexander Iolas, Dancer Beamont-sur-l’oise II

Herbert List was born in 1903 in Hamburg. Born into a wealthy family, he studied literature at the University of Heidelberg (1921-1923). During his visits to coffee plantations in Guatemala, Costa Rica, San Salvador and Brazil for the needs of the family business in 1925-1928, he began to take photographs of the places he visited. His acquaintance with Andreas Feininger was a catalyst, as he cultivated his interest in photography and gave him a Rolleiflex camera, with which he captured portraits of friends and still lifes, and later male nudes and landscape images in Italy and Greece, which were published in magazines and books. He was a contributor to major magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Verve, Photographie, but his involvement in fashion photography did not satisfy him and he returned to landscape and still life photography. During World War II he was forced to return to Germany and join the German army, despite his Jewish roots. After the war he photographed the ruins of Munich, where he lived until 1960 and worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines. In 1961 he was awarded the David Octavius Hill Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner. In 1988 his book "Junge Männer" was published, which contains more than seventy photographs of young men basking in the sun, struggling, ignoring the camera lens. He died in 1975 in Munich.