Ernst Haas, acclaimed as one of the most celebrated and influential photographers of this century, was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921. He attended medical school, but his strong artistic bent led him to the camera. He acquired his first camera, a rolleiflex, in 1946 on the black market with 10 kilograms of margerine received for his 25th Birthday. In 1947 he held his first exhibition in Vienna. Only two years later, following the publication of his photographs on returning Austrian prisoners of war, he was invited to join the international photographers’ cooperative, the Magnum Agency.

Haas moved to the United States in 1951, and for the next 30 years he travelled extensively, photographing for a wide variety of publications, including Life, Vogue, Look, Der Stern, and Geo. In addition, he became increasingly well-known for his movie set photographs documenting the making of such films as “The Third Man” “The Misfits” “West Side Story”, “Land of the Pharoahs”, “Little Big Man”, and “Quest for Fire”. Haas’s work with film extended to a four-part series (The Art of Seeing”) which he wrote, directed and narrated. Over the course of his career, Haas spent an increasing amount of time on his own projects. He was the author of four major photographic texts, The Creation, In America, In Germany and Himalayan Pilgrimage. The first edition of The Creation, published in 1971, eventually sold over 300,000 copies.

During his lifetime, Haas’s photography was the subject of numerous American and European exhibitions, including Photokina (Cologne), Photomuseum (Munich), Museum das 20 Cahrhunderts (Vienna), La Fotogaleria (Madrid), and in New York : Asia House, the ICP, and the IBM gallery. At the Museum of Modern Art his work was the subject of their first exhibition devoted solely to the colour photography of a single artist. Since his death in 1986, Haas has continued to be the subject of museum exhibitions and of numerous publications, he is exhibited here in London for the first time in 25 years.