1991 Infinity Award: Lifetime Achievement

Andreas Feininger was a pioneer both visually and technically. Born in Paris, son of the painter Lyonel Feininger, Andreas was educated in German public schools and at the Weimar Bauhaus. His interest in photography developed while he was studying architecture, and he worked as both architect and photographer in Germany for four years, until political circumstances made it impossible. He moved to Paris, where he worked in Le Corbusier's studio, and then to Stockholm. In Sweden, he established his own photographic firm specializing in architectural and industrial photography.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Feininger moved to New York, where he worked as a freelance photographer for the Black Star Agency and then for the U.S. Office of War Information. From 1943 to '62, he was a staff photographer at LIFE. He subsequently concentrated on his personal work, exhibiting and publishing extensively.

Feininger's purpose in photography was documentation of the unity of natural things, their interdependence, and their similarity to constructed forms. His images emphasize design, deploying the principles of simplicity, clarity, and organization. In addition to natural forms, Feininger's subject matter included the city, machines, and sculpture. He built four customized telephoto lenses and three close-up cameras, which allowed him to represent landscapes and city scenes in a distortion-free monumental perspective, and to show small subjects in startling sizes. He preferred black-and-white photography for the graphic control it allowed.