Wolfgang Sievers

Wolfgang Georg Sievers, AO (18 September 1913 – 7 August 2007) was an Australian photographer who specialised in architectural and industrial photography.

Sievers was born in Berlin, Germany. His father was Professor Johannes Sievers, an art and architectural historian with the German Foreign Office until his dismissal by the Nazi government in 1933, and author of the first four volumes of a monograph on the neo-classical architect Karl Schinkel. His mother was Herma Schiffer, a writer and educator of Jewish background who was Director of the Institute for Educational Films.

From 1936 to 1938, he studied at the Contempora Lehrateliers für neue Werkkunst in Berlin, a progressive private art school created by architect Fritz August Breuhaus de Groot, which, like the famous Bauhaus, strongly emphasized the unity of all applied arts. Sievers took architectural photographs for his father's books on Berlin's historical buildings, particularly the work of Karl Schinkel. He also spent a year working in Portugal from 1935 to 1936. In 1938, he was retained as a teacher at the Contempora, but decided to emigrate to Australia following rumours of the school's imminent closure by the authorities. He had arranged for his photographic equipment to be transported, but was briefly questioned by the Gestapo, then conscripted as an aerial photographer for the Luftwaffe. He fled the country immediately, going first to England in June.

In the evening I took the train to Cologne. The next day I was in Holland, the day after that I was in England, in Kent, where my brother lived already, and he took me to the pub and I got drunk on cloudy Kentish cider for the first time in my life. It was wonderful!

In Australia, Sievers opened a studio in South Yarra, Melbourne. After war was declared, he volunteered for the Australian Army and served from 1942 to 1946. Following demobilisation, he established a studio at Grosvenor Chambers in fashionable Collins Street, initially drawing many of his commissions from fellow European immigrants including the architect Frederick Romberg, and Ernst Fuchs who had arrived from Vienna. During his early years in Melbourne, Sievers became a lifelong friend of fellow émigré photographer Helmut Newton and his Australian actress wife June Browne, who later made photographs herself under the pseudonym "Alice Springs".

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