Herbert List’s working approach is characterized by a deeply intuitive and self‑reflexive engagement with photography.

As an autodidact emerging in the late 1920s, List treated the camera as a means to reveal the hidden, the metaphysical, and the emotionally resonant aspects of everyday life. Influenced by Surrealism, Neoclassicism, and Magic Realism, he crafted images that fuse formal precision with dreamlike mood—be it in still lifes, nocturnal urban scenes, homoerotic portraits or architectural studies.

A hallmark of his method was the creation of vintage prints made personally by List, often small in scale yet rich in tonal depth—images intended for quiet, contemplative viewing rather than large-scale display. His practice embraced dualities: documenting the classical past (e.g. Greek antiquities), capturing modern city life (postwar Munich, Italian street scenes), and navigating personal identity (his male nudes reflect an intimate “queer gaze”).

The publication Herbert List: Das magische Auge, issued on the occasion of his first international retrospective in over twenty years at the Bucerius Kunst Forum (May–September 2022), brings together around 240 original prints spanning more than thirty years. The catalog is structured in seven chapters—Hamburg beginnings, Fotografia Metafisica, Greece, Young Men, Italy, Artist Portraits, and Reportages—each underscoring a distinct thematic and stylistic focus.

Curated by Kathrin Baumstark (Bucerius Kunst Forum) and Ulrich Pohlmann (Munich City Museum) in cooperation with the Herbert List Estate, the exhibition and its catalog illuminate List’s conviction that photography could make “the magical in the transient visible.” Amid postwar upheaval, identity struggles, and aesthetic experimentation, he crafted an oeuvre that remains both formally elegant and profoundly personal—bringing the unseen into view through “the magic eye.”