Théodore Brauner

Théodore Brauner was born in 1914 in Vienna

Brauner was born in Vienna in 1914 to a Jewish family from Piatra Neamț in Romania. His father, Hermann Brauner, was a timber industrialist, and his mother was named Dvora Zlata. He was the younger brother of the surrealist painter Victor Brauner, and the family lived in Bucharest from 1918.

As a teenager he founded a magazine with friends, and in 1929 he joined Alge, a surrealist art journal. In 1934 in Bucharest he invented Solarfix, a way of making images on photographic paper without a camera or darkroom. He used sunlight and secret chemical processes to add color.

In 1942 he fled Romania by ship and reached Beirut, where the British arrested him and sent him to detention camps in Cyprus. He reached Tel Aviv in 1944 and sent photo stories to newspapers. From 1945 he was a friend of Robert Capa.

In 1952 his Solarfix works were shown in a group exhibition in Jerusalem. He settled in Paris in 1956 and began a series of photographs called Masks. In the 1950s he also worked as a photographer for Israel's Government Press Office.

In 1954 he began Silent Visitor, a photo project in which an animal triggered the camera itself. It was published in 1962. He died in 2000.