A towering figure in the history of photography, Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) has come to epitomize New Objectivity, the signature artistic style of Germany's Weimar Republic. His iconic photographs of geometrically intricate cacti, flooded tidal landscapes, stacks of raw materials, complex gear assemblies, and imposing blast furnace towers exploit the camera's unique capacity to document with uncompromising detail. They embody what his contemporary the journalist Hugo Sieker termed "absolute realism." Renger-Patzsch's skills as a writer remain much less known. He advocated his unique brand of exacting realism across more than fifty articles, essays, lectures, promotional brochures, and unpublished manuscripts addressing the medium of photography, technology, and modernity. Drawing on materials from Renger-Patzsch's papers at the Getty Research Institute and other archives. The Absolute Realist: Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923-1967 unites in one volume this skillful photographer's ideas about the defining visual medium of modernity.