Adolf Fassbender

Adolf Fassbender was born in 1884 in Grevenbroich, a small town near Cologne, Germany. After assisting a photographer in Freiburg, he worked and studied drawing and painting in Dresden, and later specialized in hand-colored miniature portraits in Vienna and Antwerp. In 1911, he immigrated to the United States, initially working for the Selby Sisters before opening his own studio in New York in 1921. For the next seven years, he focused on commercial, illustrative, and portrait photography, exhibiting some of his work at national conventions of the Photographers’ Association of America.

In the early 1920s, Fassbender became interested in pictorialism and began creating artistic images using the camera. Over the next two decades, he exhibited his work in pictorial salons, with his first acceptance by London’s Royal Photographic Society in 1925. He held solo exhibitions at the Camera Club of New York in 1934 and the Smithsonian Institution in 1951. Fassbender was also an active member of various camera clubs in New York and received honorary memberships from groups across the country. He was a founding member of the Photographic Society of America.