De razende saxofoon

Otto Maximiliaan Umbehr (pseudonym Umbo) (Düsseldorf, Germany, January 18, 1902 – Hanover, May 13, 1980) was a German photographer and photojournalist.
Otto was the second of six children of Karl Friedrich Umbehr, an industrial architect. His mother Frieda died in 1910. He studied in Duisburg, Aachen, and Düsseldorf, and in 1921 at the Bauhaus in Weimar with Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, and Wassily Kandinsky. There he met László Moholy-Nagy, one of the most important photographers of the Bauhaus.
Otto Umbehr started a photo studio with the help of Paul Citroen in 1926 and almost immediately became one of the founders of a new photographic aesthetic with his innovative portraits of fashionable Berlin. He made photomontages as a camera assistant for Walter Ruttmann's film Die Sinfonie einer Grosstadt (The Symphony of a Metropolis).
At the end of 1928, Umbo became one of the founders of the Dephot agency (Deutscher Photodienst GmbH), which presented a new style of photojournalism in 1933. Umbo worked mainly in the entertainment industry with his camera. But the agency was closed during the confiscation of assets (Machtergreifung) by the Nazis in 1933.

During the Nazi period, Umbehr worked as a photojournalist, but this was hardly possible as an artist. In 1943, his photo archives in Berlin, containing between 50,000 and 60,000 negatives, were destroyed in a bombing raid, and only a few of his works have survived.
Confused by the war and the post-war period, Umbo returned to Hanover in 1945 with his wife Imgard Wanders, a graphic designer with whom he had a daughter. He lost his left eye during renovations. He then began photographing images of post-war ruins. Later, he taught photography at the School of Applied Arts in Hanover.

In 1931, Umbehr created a photomontage for Simon Koster's book De razende saxofoon (The Raging Saxophone) for the World Library in Amsterdam under the pseudonym Umbo.