Passionate Publishers
The Founders of the Black Star Photo Agency
Rights Sold
Description
Author(s)
Phoebe Kornfeld
| Publisher | Archway Publishing |
| Publication | Aug 12, 2021 |
| Format | Paperback/Softback |
| ISBN | 978-1665709057 |
| Pages | 514 |
| Dimensions | 6 x 9 |
| Age | Adult 18+ |
| Price | $33.99 |
Passionate Publishers
The Founders of the Black Star Photo Agency
Three men. One remarkable partnership. A revolution in how the world saw the news.
Ernest Mayer, Kurt Safranski, and Kurt Kornfeld built successful careers in the vibrant publishing world of Weimar Germany. All three were Jewish. When Hitler came to power, persecution forced them to abandon the country they called home and begin again in America.
In New York in 1935, they founded Black Star, the pioneering photo agency that would help transform modern photojournalism. Working with leading photographers and major publications including Life, Time, and National Geographic, they brought images of world events into millions of homes and helped establish photography as a powerful language of news.
But exile did not end their ordeal. During World War II, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI pursued Black Star’s founders for years on suspicions of espionage—without charges ever being brought.
Drawing on family archives, government records, correspondence, photographs, and previously inaccessible sources, Passionate Publishers uncovers an extraordinary story of displacement, reinvention, friendship, enterprise, and the enduring importance of a free press.
Author
Phoebe Kornfeld
Phoebe Kornfeld is a retired international lawyer and historian whose work explores Germany’s twentieth-century political, legal, and publishing history. She holds a BA in government and German from St. Lawrence University, a PhD in political science from Duke University, and a JD from Duke University School of Law. As a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, she conducted legal research in Berlin, and her fluency in German and years living in German-speaking countries have shaped her archival research. She is the author of Passionate Publishers: The Founders of the Black Star Photo Agency, which reconstructs the story of three German Jewish émigrés who helped transform American photojournalism. Salvaging Germany draws on family and institutional archives to recover the postwar reporting of her uncle, Time correspondent Alfred Kornfeld.