Alfred Ehrhardt (1901-1984) - musician, art educator, and painter - was dismissed from his university position by the National Socialists in 1933 and subsequently turned to photography. Christiane Stahl analyzes Alfred Ehrhardt's photographic work against the backdrop of the artistic, ideological, and political trends of the first half of the 20th century. Ehrhardt captures the impulses of his time and transforms them into a new stylistic unity. His work combines the structural experiments of the New Vision and the nature-philosophically grounded, typological approach of New Objectivity photography with a composition, material quality, and abstraction sensibility honed at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Ehrhardt's artistic development, particularly the influence of his time at the Bauhaus, where he learned the graphic handling of light-dark contrasts and surface structures, is significant.