German photographer Herbert List was BOTD in 1903. Born in Hamburg to a prominent Jewish mercantile family, he studied at the University of Heidelberg before working for his family’s coffee business. In the 1920s, he undertook extensive visits to coffee plantations in South America, also visiting San Francisco, where he met the American photographer Andreas Feininger. Inspired by the Bauhaus and Surrealist movements, he he began taking nude photos of his male friends, keeping them hidden in his mother’s house in a sack he called his “poison bag”. With the rise of the Nazi Party, he fled Germany for Paris in 1936, apprenticing with society photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, who found him work with Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Life magazines. He travelled extensively through Greece in the late 1930s, photographing ancient temples, ruins and sculptures for his book Licht über Hellas. In 1941, he was forced to return to Germany, where he was unable to work due to his Jewish heritage. Eventually conscripted into the Wehrmacht, he served in Norway as a map designer, and visited Paris where he made portraits of artists Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Joan Miró. After the war, he remained in Germany, producing gritty neo-realist portraits of the ruins of Munich, accepting occasional commissions from Magnum magazine, and making portraits of Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden, Anna Magnani and Marlene Dietrich. He abandoned photography in the 1960s to concentrate on collecting Italian Renaissance drawings. He died in 1975, aged 71. In 1988, his male nudes were published in the book Junge Männer (Young Men), with an introduction by his friend Stephen Spender, prompting some critics to compare his aesthetic to Nazi photographer Leni Riefenstahl. His work was highly influential on contemporary fashion and art photography, notably the work of Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. He was lightly fictionalised in Spender’s novel The Temple, first published in 1988.