Franz Wilhelm Seiwert created this painting as a tribute to both the medium of photography and the photographer August Sander, the work’s first owner. Schematically depicting the operation of a large-format camera, the picture shows how the photographic subject at far left is transformed into a black-and-white print at the bottom center of the composition.

Seiwert was a founding member of the Cologne Progressives, a group of artists who turned away from the total abstraction practiced by their contemporaries. Instead, they developed an easily legible and quasi-abstract style that could be understood by all members of society, regardless of their prior experience with art. Using unsentimental imagery to advance progressive social themes, they brought to painting the democratic spirit of both photography and public murals.