CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/5/2019

What's not to love about Germans, vintage photography and Polar Bears?

Featured image is reproduced from Polar Bears, the infectious new book of German vintage photography from Jochen Raiss, the collector behind perennial bestseller Women in Trees. "It is said that in times of climate change, the polar bear is the most popular animal in the world," Norbert Thomma writes. "In the 1920s, people presumably had less sympathy for it, but it was admired for its savage exoticism. It is not known who first came up with the idea of photographs of people posing with polar bears. A successful ad campaign by Steiff, the German manufacturer of stuffed animals, may have provided the inspiration, or maybe it was billboards for a large zoo. Jochen Raiss… considers both theses improbable. He believes some clever photographer at a seaside resort on the Baltic Sea must have been the first to discover polar bears as a business model, had his assistant get into a costume, and take photographs at popular tourist sites, which were then quickly developed by a second assistant." See other Staff Pick Stocking Stuffers here!