Heinrich Kuhn was a German photographer, writer and scientist. His first use of photography was his microphotography in medical research in histology and bacteriology at the Robert-Koch-Institut in Berlin. His asthmatic condition led him to abandon his job as a doctor and to move to Innsbruck, where he devoted himself to photography, supported by family wealth. His first influences were from the Vienna Secession and from Linked Ring, which he joined in 1896, encouraging him to take part in the international exhibition of art photography in Vienna in 1891. He was also strongly affected by his meeting with Hans Watzek at the Weiner Camera-Klub in 1894. Watzek, Hugo Henneberg and Kuhn worked together from 1896 on the multiple-gum printing technique to attain the broadest possible range of tonal values. They exhibited frequently together from 1897 to 1903 at Das Kleeblatt, publishing numerous articles on the techniques of artistic representation with which they made a case for photography as a fine art.
As we see in Mother and Daughter, Kuhn was one of the finest photographers of the Secessionist and Pictorialist movement. He had an ability to take very intimate subjects whether they were landscape or figurative and imbue them with timeless modernity and statement. Mother and Daughter was not a portrait in the specific sense but a snapshot in time of what is universal to all Mothers and Daughters. Photogravure was a great medium for Kuhn and he produced a high number of these photographs but all with high quality, which is the nature of photogravure. Its grainier and rich feel heightened the work of the pictorialists.
