Herbert Tobias

Herbert Tobias (14 December 1924 - 17 August 1982) was a German photographer who first became well known for his fashion photography during the 1950s. His portrait studies, his photographs of Russia during World War II and his homoerotic pictures of men are all of artistic value. He died from AIDS, one of the first well-known people in Germany to do so.

Herbert Tobias was born in Dessau, the son of a gunmaker. He taught himself photography from the age of ten. His ambition was to become an actor, but the early death of his father in 1936 prevented him. After some time as a surveyor in Höxter Tobias was called up to the Wehrmacht in 1942 and sent to the Russian Front, where he took his first significant photographs. Shortly before the end of the war he deserted and was captured by the Americans on the Western Front. He was released at the end of 1945.

After attending a stage school in Siegburg he obtained an engagement with the touring theatre company Niedersachsen-Bühne. In 1948, while staying in the area of Heidelberg he fell in love with, and began a relationship with, a civilian employee of the American Forces of Occupation. In 1950 both men were denounced under § 175 of the German Criminal Code, and moved to Paris.

There Tobias met the famous German photographer Willy Maywald, for whom he worked as a retoucher and who gave him his first contacts in the world of fashion. In 1953 Tobias' first pictures appeared in Vogue. In the same year, after resisting arrest during a police raid on a gay establishment, he was thrown out of France and returned to Heidelberg. From October 1953 his fashion photographs began to appear in German magazines and in November, out of over 18,000 entrants, he won first prize in a highly lucrative competition for the front page photo of the Frankfurter Illustrierten Zeitung.

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