by Jerome D.
Introduction
Ernst Haas (1921–1986) was one of the most visionary photographers of the twentieth century — the Austrian-born pioneer who demonstrated, against considerable resistance from the photographic establishment, that colour photography was a legitimate artistic medium capable of carrying the same expressive weight as any painting, and who did so by reinventing what a photograph could look like.
Born on 2 March 1921 in Vienna, Haas grew up in a cultivated household that valued art, music, and literature. His schooling was interrupted by Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938. Forced out of medical school due to his Jewish ancestry, he found his way to photography almost by accident — entering his father's darkroom after his father's death in 1940, printing old family negatives, and discovering that the medium could satisfy both of his deepest desires: to travel and to paint. "I never really wanted to be a photographer. It slowly grew out of the compromise of a boy who desired to combine two goals — explorer or painter. I wanted to travel, see and experience. What better profession could there be than the one of a photographer, almost a painter in a hurry?"
In 1946, aged 25, he traded a 20-pound block of margarine on the Vienna black market for his first camera — a Rolleiflex. Within three years, his documentation of returning Austrian prisoners of war had been published in Heute magazine and in Life, bringing him to international attention and an invitation from Robert Capa to join Magnum Photos in 1949.
His move to New York in 1951 was transformative. Surrounded by a city of overwhelming visual intensity — neon signs, yellow cabs, the geometry of skyscrapers, the blur of crowds — he began experimenting with Kodachrome colour film in his Leica. In 1953, Life published his 24-page colour photo essay "Images of a Magic City" — the first complete colour story the magazine had ever published. It was a watershed moment, not just for Haas's career but for colour photography's acceptance as serious art.
He served as the 4th President of Magnum Photos from 1959. He gave the first single-artist colour photography exhibition at MoMA in New York. He published landmark books including The Creation (1971) and In America (1975). His photographs were used for the Kodak Colorama at Grand Central Station. He received the Hasselblad Award in 1986 and the Leica Medal of Excellence in 1986, the year of his death.
He died on 12 September 1986 in New York, aged 65. His estate and archive are managed by his children Alexander and Victoria Haas.
As he said of his approach: "I am not interested in shooting new things — I am interested to see things new."
Camera Gear Used by Ernst Haas
Ernst Haas's gear history is unusually well documented, with Wikipedia, the Leica Society International, the Leica Barnack Berek Blog, and Shooter Files all providing consistent, corroborated accounts. The back cover of his landmark book The Creation (1971) shows him holding a Leicaflex SL with a 400mm f/6.8 Telyt lens — a primary source confirmation of that system. A specific photograph confirmed to have been used for a 1977 Kodak Colorama at Grand Central Station is documented as having been taken with a Leicaflex SL and a 50mm Summicron-R on Kodachrome 25.
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| Leicaflex SL |
Early Career Camera
Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex (medium format) — Confirmed by Wikipedia, the Leica Society International, and Shooter Files as his first camera, acquired in 1946 in exchange for 20 pounds of margarine on the Vienna black market. He used it for his earliest work, including the Austrian prisoners of war series that established his reputation and was published in Heute and Life in 1949. In the late 1940s he switched from the Rolleiflex to a Leica rangefinder — the transition confirmed by Wikipedia: "In the late 1940s, Haas switched from his medium format Rolleiflex to the smaller 35mm Leica rangefinder camera, which he used consistently for the rest of his career."
Primary Career Camera: Leica Rangefinders
Leica rangefinder cameras (M3, M4) — Confirmed by Wikipedia as the cameras he "used consistently for the rest of his career" after his late-1940s switch from the Rolleiflex. The Leica Society International confirms that he began using Leicas in the early 1950s, encouraged by Capa and Cartier-Bresson, and that his landmark Life colour essays were shot with Kodachrome-loaded Leicas. Shooter Files states: "A Leica 35mm rangefinder became his camera of choice."
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| Leica M4 |
The compact, quiet Leica was the ideal instrument for his working method: responsive enough to capture the blur of motion, unobtrusive enough to work close to subjects in the streets of New York, and small enough to allow the rapid, instinctive shooting that his approach to colour and movement demanded.
SLR System: Leicaflex SL and SL2
Leicaflex SL and SL2 — Confirmed by multiple strong primary sources. The back cover of The Creation (1971) shows Haas holding a Leicaflex SL with a 400mm f/6.8 Telyt slip-grip lens — a direct photographic confirmation. The Leica Barnack Berek Blog confirms: "During the 1970s, Leica used photographs of Ernst Haas using the Leicaflex SL/SL2 in advertisements" — visible in copies of National Geographic and other publications of the period. Shooter Files adds that he favoured the 28mm, 50mm, and 90mm lenses on the Leicaflex system.
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| Leica SL2 |
The specific photograph used for the Kodak Colorama at Grand Central Station in 1977 — one of the largest photographic prints ever made, 18×60 feet — is documented by the Leica Barnack Berek Blog as having been taken with a Leicaflex SL and a 50mm Summicron-R lens on Kodachrome 25. It was the first time a 35mm photograph had been used for the Colorama project, and represented a 508-times enlargement — a testament to both the quality of the film and the Leicaflex system's optics.
Lenses
Leicaflex R lenses — 28mm, 50mm, and 90mm confirmed. Shooter Files confirms these as his preferred focal lengths on the Leicaflex system. The 50mm Summicron-R f/2 is specifically confirmed by the Leica Barnack Berek Blog via the Grand Central Colorama documentation. The 400mm f/6.8 Telyt is confirmed by the back cover portrait of The Creation.
His use of long telephoto lenses was central to one of his most distinctive techniques: the deliberate use of slow shutter speeds in combination with telephoto compression to create the blur-and-overlap colour effects that defined his bullfighting images and much of his motion work. The telephoto's compression of space meant that overlapping blurred elements from different distances merged into new colour fields — an effect impossible to replicate with wide-angle or normal lenses.
Film Stock
Kodachrome — His defining film, confirmed by Wikipedia ("he most often used Kodachrome, known for its rich, saturated colors"), the Leica Society International, and Shooter Files. From his arrival in New York in 1951 through to his career's end, Kodachrome was the medium through which his colour vision was expressed. He used Kodachrome I (ISO 8) in his earliest New York work — an extraordinarily slow film that demanded careful management of light and shutter speed — and later Kodachrome 25 as the emulsion improved. The specific Colorama image is confirmed on Kodachrome 25.
Dye transfer printing — Confirmed by Wikipedia as his preferred printing process for colour work: "To print his color work, Haas used the dye transfer process whenever possible." Dye transfer is an expensive and labour-intensive analogue colour printing process that allows exceptional control over colour hue and saturation — far beyond what standard chromogenic printing could achieve. It was normally used for advertising work; Haas applied it to his fine art prints to achieve the luminous, saturated quality that made his colour output so extraordinary.
Technique and Style
Ernst Haas's photography is defined by three innovations that were genuinely unprecedented in the 1950s and that shaped colour photography for generations: his treatment of colour as a compositional element, his deliberate use of motion blur as a creative tool, and his understanding of the photograph as an abstract form — one that could suggest, evoke, and allude rather than simply document.
His colour was not the colour of things as they were. It was the colour of things as the light transformed them, or as motion blurred and merged them, or as the compression of a telephoto lens stacked them against each other into unexpected relationships. He described his blurring technique with characteristic precision: by deliberately choosing a slow shutter speed and moving the camera — or allowing a moving subject to blur — he could create new colours through the overlap of adjacent colour fields. Two separate colours, blurred together, produce a third that exists nowhere in the original scene.
His bullfighting images — made in Spain with a Leicaflex and telephoto lens on slow-shutter Kodachrome — are the canonical examples of this technique: streaks of red cape against the blur of a bull's body, the matador's gold costume dissolving into a smear of reflected arena light. They look like paintings. They are photographs. That distinction was exactly what Haas wanted to challenge.
His approach to abstraction was rooted in his painter's training. He was explicit that he did not consider his more abstract images to actually be abstract: "That is a contradiction of terms. A photograph cannot possibly be abstract because a camera can only record actual subject matter." What looked abstract was simply ordinary reality seen freshly — the formal qualities of light, colour, and surface that are always present in the visible world, made visible by the camera's ability to isolate and transform.
He worked across an enormous range of subjects and disciplines: documentary photojournalism, fine art colour photography, advertising, movie stills (on the sets of films including Moulin Rouge and The Misfits), and the environmental documentation of The Creation. This range was possible because his visual intelligence was genuinely transferable — the same eye that saw colour and motion on a New York street saw it equally in a Spanish bullfight, a Venetian canal, or a Himalayan landscape.
How to Imitate His Style in Post-Processing
Haas's colour aesthetic — saturated, luminous, with a warmth rooted in Kodachrome's specific palette — is one of the most admired in the history of colour photography. Pixlr is an excellent tool for approaching his look:
Saturate the warm tones, not the cool ones.
Kodachrome renders warm colours — reds, oranges, yellows — with particular richness, while blues and greens are cooler and more neutral. In Pixlr's HSL tool, push the saturation of reds and oranges by 15–20%, and leave the blues and greens at or slightly below normal. This approximates the Kodachrome colour signature more accurately than any global saturation adjustment.
Use motion blur creatively.
Haas's most celebrated technique — the deliberate slow-shutter blur — can be approximated in Pixlr using the Motion Blur filter. Apply it selectively to a moving subject while leaving the background relatively sharp, or apply it to the full frame at a low intensity to suggest movement. The key is intentionality: the blur must feel purposeful rather than accidental.
Enrich the shadow warmth.
Kodachrome's shadow areas have a specific warm quality — a slight amber or brownish cast in the dark tones rather than the cool blue-black of modern digital sensors. In Pixlr's Colour Grading or Split Toning tool, add a very subtle warm tint to the shadows. This is the single most effective step for approximating the characteristic feel of his film work.
Protect the highlights.
Haas was a meticulous manager of exposure. His highlights are held — bright, luminous, but never blown. In Pixlr's Curves tool, add a slight pull-down at the top of the curve to protect the brightest tones from clipping. His images glow rather than blow out.
Look for the colour overlap.
His most distinctive images work because two or more colour fields are in dialogue — not by accident but by deliberate placement or timing. In post-processing, look at the colour structure of your image: is there one dominant hue, or a relationship between two or three? Adjust your cropping and toning to strengthen that relationship rather than neutralise it.
How to Shoot Like Ernst Haas
Treat colour as a compositional element, not a recording medium.
Before raising the camera, ask what the colour structure of the scene is: where are the dominant hues, how do they respond to the light, what happens when they are placed in the same frame? Colour, for Haas, was what line and tone were for earlier photographers — the primary organising force of the image.
Use slow shutter speeds deliberately.
Haas's motion blur was not a technical failure to be corrected — it was a creative choice. Try shooting in low light or at ISO 100 in bright conditions with a slow shutter speed (1/15s–1/4s), and allow moving subjects to blur. Experiment with panning — following a moving subject while tracking it — to produce sharp subjects against blurred backgrounds. The blur creates colour; the colour creates the image.
Use a telephoto lens for colour compression.
His bullfighting images and many of his street abstractions used long lenses to compress multiple colour planes into a single frame. A 90mm or 135mm lens on a full-frame camera stacks the spatial layers of a scene — a red door, a yellow figure, a blue shadow — in a way that a wide-angle lens separates. The compression is the content.
Find the abstract in the ordinary.
He photographed reflections in puddles, light on water, the blurred geometry of traffic, the colour of neon on wet pavement — all ordinary urban phenomena, made extraordinary by the attention he brought to their formal qualities. Train yourself to photograph the texture and colour of the world rather than the events happening within it.
Read widely and across disciplines.
Haas's visual education was as much literary and painterly as photographic. His awareness of abstract painting, poetry, music, and cinema gave him a cross-disciplinary fluency in visual language that most photographers — trained primarily within the medium — do not develop. Seek out formative experiences in other arts and bring them to the camera.
Think about scale.
Haas's images were made to be printed large — the Kodak Colorama was 18×60 feet, and his dye transfer prints were made to be seen at exhibition scale. If you intend to print your work, think from the moment of capture about whether the image will hold at large scale — whether the colour relationships and tonal structure are rich enough to sustain the exposure.
Legacy
Ernst Haas's legacy is substantial and specific. He established colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium in the United States at a moment when the photographic establishment was deeply resistant to that claim. His 1953 Life essay, his MoMA exhibition, and his books convinced a generation of photographers and curators that colour was not a commercial concession but a creative language with its own unique possibilities.
His influence is most clearly visible in the photographers who came immediately after him: Harry Gruyaert, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, and Alex Webb all work in a tradition of colour photography that Haas helped establish. His specific techniques — the deliberate blur, the telephoto compression of colour planes, the use of reflections and abstraction — became part of the vocabulary of serious colour photography.
His books remain in print and in demand. The Creation, his environmental meditation on natural forms and light, was one of the bestselling photography books of the 1970s. In America captured a country at a specific historical moment with the same colour intelligence he brought to New York in 1951. Both belong in any serious photography library.
He received the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize and the Leica Medal of Excellence in 1986 — the year he died, aged 65. His induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Louis, thirty years after his death, confirmed the permanent place of his contribution to the medium.
The Leica Society International, writing about his legacy, described him as someone who "taught photographers how to see artistically and produce images that heretofore had been the realm of painters." That is precisely right. He was, as he described himself, a painter in a hurry — and the photographs he made in his hurry remain among the most beautiful colour images ever produced.
Books by Ernst Haas
Ernst Haas: New York in Color (1952–1962, Prestel, 2020) — His foundational colour work on New York City, the body of images that established him as the pioneer of colour photography in America. The definitive retrospective of his New York years.
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| see it on Amazon |
The Creation (1971, Viking Press) — His most celebrated book: a meditation on the natural world, photographed across every continent, presenting nature's forms as abstract colour compositions of extraordinary beauty. One of the bestselling photography books of the 1970s.
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| see it on Amazon |
In America (1975, Viking Press) — A portrait of the United States in the early 1970s, combining landscape, architecture, portraiture, and street photography in a sustained colour vision of a country at a particular historical moment.
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| see it on Amazon |
Ernst Haas: Color Photography (1989, Harry N. Abrams) — A posthumous retrospective of his colour work across four decades, published three years after his death. The most comprehensive single volume of his career work.
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| see it on Amazon |
Conclusion
Ernst Haas photographed with a Rolleiflex in his earliest years, then switched decisively to the Leica rangefinder in the late 1940s, using it loaded with Kodachrome for his landmark colour essays. By the 1970s he was working primarily with the Leicaflex SL and SL2 — confirmed by the back cover of The Creation, by Leica's own advertisements of the period, and by the documented record of the Grand Central Colorama image made on a Leicaflex SL with a 50mm Summicron-R on Kodachrome 25.
He printed his colour work in dye transfer wherever possible, achieving a luminosity and saturation that no other process of the era could match.
None of this equipment was unusual for a professional photographer of his era. What was unusual was his understanding of what it could do — his conviction that a camera loaded with colour film, in the right light, with the right shutter speed and the right eye, could produce something that had never been seen before.
"I am not interested in shooting new things — I am interested to see things new."
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