Sievers grew up in Germany during a period known as the Weimar Republic. During the Weimar Republic, Germany - and especially Berlin - become a cultural centre for intellectual thought, art, design, and music.

Sievers studied photography at the Contempora School for Applied Arts in Berlin, a successor to the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was a school of design that emerged in the early twentieth century, bringing together a collective of architects, artists and craftspeople interested in taking advantage of technological developments to improve society.

The Weimar Republic lasted from the end of the World War I in 1918 until 1933, when Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Worker’s (Nazi) party came to power.

The Nazi party enacted many new laws once in power. Several of these new laws targeted people from certain religious or cultural backgrounds. People of the Jewish faith were particularly persecuted and had many freedoms restricted in Germany.

Sievers’ mother was Jewish which meant, under Nazi law, he and his family could be targeted by the oppressive laws. So, in 1938, fearing increasing persecution in Nazi Germany, the Sievers family fled and migrated to Australia.

On arrival in Australia, Wolfgang Sievers enlisted in the armed forces. He served in the Australia Army from 1942 to 1946.

After the war, Sievers concentrated on a career as a photographer. He worked with other famous modernist photographers in Melbourne, including Axel Poignant and Athol Shmith.

Sievers’ photographs, like modernist photography in general, used sharp focus and took advantage of the camera as a tool. Straight lines, geometric patterns and close ups of machinery were common. This style moved away the earlier photographic style of pictorialism, which was more interested in making the scene look like a painting. Sievers’ work highlighted the technical aspects of the subject matter as opposed to the beauty.