‘On May 1 I will very probably be traveling to the United States at the invitation of THE FOREIGN SERVICE OF THE U. S. A. for a three-month study tour for journalists. Apart from the first two weeks, where we’ll be schooled together in history, etc., it won’t be a group excursion. Instead one can to arrange the rest of the t.mes for oneself, on one’s own, see whatever and whomever one wants. That.mes ans, with $10 of pocket money a day and all travel expenses paid, I can roam around the country just as I please–a once-in-a-lifet.mes opportunity.’
Otto Umbehr, better known to history as Umbo, was among twenty German photographers and journalists invited to come to America as part of its post-war re-education program. Traveling along the East Coast from New York to Washington, south to New Orleans, west to California, and returning east by way of Colorado, Kansas, and Chicago, Umbo made more than 1,500 photographs before returning to Germany. Particularly fascinated with structural and industrial aspects of the country, the Bauhaus-trained Umbo captured in his photographs the dynamism of the t.mes , and he brought his penchant for unconventional vantage points into his work as a photojournalist.
This was Umbo’s final large-scale photographic project. Editing the hundreds of images back in Germany, Umbo conceived of a book about his “American Journey.” The group of photographs offered here formed a maquette, likely prepared to encourage editors and publishers to take on this project. The book project ultimately was never realized and these photographs languished, all but forgotten, for several decades.
The photographer’s vast estate is now largely held by three museums: Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and the Berlinische Galerie. While other photographs from Umbo’s t.mes in America are in the collects ion of the Sprengel Museum, no other maquette from this project is known.