An exhibition by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in cooperation with the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio, Düsseldorf
Anonyme Skulpturen. Eine Typologie technischer Bauten, Düsseldorf: Art-Press Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Buildings, Düsseldorf: Art-Press 1970 (Buchcover) Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
When we think about the most influential photographers of the first five decades of the 20th century we conjure up names such as Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, László Moholy-Nagy, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott, to name just a few – and by influential, I mean those photographers that altered the intensification of the medium – the conceptualisation, creation, veracity, meaning and reception of the image.
In the last 50 years of the 20th century there are less of these medium-shifting artists that have really made a difference. Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander are the two that readily spring to mind. And then there are the Bechers, Bernd & Hilla Becher. These German photographers changed the course of contemporary photographic practice, their conceptual art / objective photographic raison d’être still embedded at the heart of fine art photography today.
But, as I have argued elsewhere, their typologies and grids, their topographic state, their same same photographs and perspectives of industrial sculptures and landscapes are anything but objective. Their pictorial grammar, underlaid by a conceptual approach to subject matter, continuously reflected in the systematics of capture and display (the juxtaposition of works together), is constantly undermined by the ghost in the machine – those viral codes of mutation and difference which cannot be controlled.
While they professed to “eschew entirely entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,” every photograph they took involves a subjective point of view, an element of uniqueness and beauty that can never be repeated.
“Despite protestations to the contrary (appeals to the objectivity of the image, eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion; the rigorous frontality of the individual images giving them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness) these are subjective images for all their objective desire. The paradox is the more a photographer strives for objectivity, the more ego drops away, the more the work becomes their own: subjective, beautiful, emotive.
Even though the Bechers’ demonstrate great photographic restraint with regard to documenting the object, the documentary gaze is always corrupted / mutated / distorted by personal interpretation: where to position the camera, what to include or exclude, how to interpret the context of place, how to crop or print the image, and how to display the image, in grids, sequences or singularly. In other words there are always multiple (con)texts to which artists conform or transgress. What makes great photographers, such as Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, August Sander and the Bechers, is the idiosyncratic “nature” of their vision: how Atget places his large view camera – at that particular height and angle to the subject – leaves an indelible feeling that only he could have made that image, to reveal the magic of that space in a photograph. It is their personal, unique thumbprint, recognisable in an instant. So it is with the Bechers.”1
For a deeper dive into the work of the Bechers, please see my text “Ghosts in the machine,” on the exhibition Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July – November, 2022.
Many thankx to Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd Becher’s Calatayud 1956 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Hilla Becher’s Untitled (Makroaufnahme von Schaum) (Macro shot of foam) c. 1960
Hilla Becher (née Wobeser) discovered photography as a teenager. Her mother had trained as a photographer at the Lette Verein in Berlin and supported her daughter’s interest. Accordingly, from 1951 to 1953, Hilla completed an apprenticeship as a photographer at the Walter Eichgrün studio in her hometown of Potsdam. In 1953, the family fled East Germany, and Hilla continued her career in West Germany. For example, in 1957 she worked at the Troost advertising agency in Düsseldorf, where she also met Bernd Becher.
The photograph shown above belongs to a series of surface and structural studies from around 1960. Nothing is known about the exact context of the photographs; however, their stylistic affinity to the “Subjective Photography” movement, which gained influence from the early 1950s onward, is interesting. Distortion techniques were an important tool in “Subjective Photography,” and Hilla Becher’s macro photographs utilise extreme proximity to the subject as a means of creating a sense of alienation.
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
An exhibition of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in cooperation with the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio, Düsseldorf
The artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931-2007/1934-2015) has written photographic history. With their joint work, which they developed from 1959 until the 2000s on the basis of an almost uninterrupted photographic activity in the industrial regions of Germany, the Benelux countries, Great Britain, France, Italy, the USA and Canada, they created a new artistically motivated documentary style.
For the first time in Europe, this exhibition will present the methodological and thematic range of their oeuvre in great detail with over 300 original black and white photographs and other exhibits by the artist couple. In the individual sections, almost all of Becher’s found subjects can be located in a compilation and sequencing largely determined by themselves. Photographs of landscapes, winding towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, gas tanks or even views of entire collieries etc. are considered her trademark. The juxtaposition of the groups of works authentically conveys the pictorial grammar developed by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their continuously reflected systematics and conceptual approach.
The exhibits come from the Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive in Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur and the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio, Düsseldorf, in collaboration with Max Becher under the supervision of the Bernd & Hilla Becher Estate. There are also loans from Sprüth Magers and the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn.
The publication accompanying the exhibition will be published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, with texts by Max Becher, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Marianne Kapfer and Urs Stahel.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne website
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Kühlturm (Cooling tower) 1962, “Mont-Cenis” mine, Herne, Ruhr area 1965 (below)
We have dedicated an entire room of our current exhibition to the group of “Anonymous Sculptures.” With this series of images, Bernd and Hilla Becher defined the building types that were important to them, such as cooling towers. The fundamental principle of the comparability of the motifs was introduced, and the work on publications, so crucial to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s artistic output, was also initiated.
You can trace the artists’ approach using 41 photographs that exemplify the building types presented in seven chapters of the 1970 publication “Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Structures.” An exhibition at the Düsseldorf Municipal Art Gallery preceded the book in 1969 [see the book cover at the top of the posting].
The term “Anonymous Sculptures” establishes a link to conceptual art. This connection between Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work and the visual arts was important for their subsequent work and its presentation in museums and galleries.
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
The first subjects Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed on their nearly fifty-year journey to documenting industrial buildings were half-timbered houses in the Siegerland region. For Bernd Becher, it was natural to photograph these “poor people’s houses,” as Hilla called them, from his childhood and youth. For the film “The Photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher,” we attempted to identify the Bechers’ subjects using the book “Siegerland Half-Timbered Houses” by Schirmer/Mosel. We asked locals and showed them the book. Although the Bechers provided the exact address of each house, they were often unrecognisable. Many, being drafty and cold, had been clad with asbestos cement, thus obscuring their exposed timber framing. Their original appearance is preserved only in the Bechers’ photographs.
Text from the Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Facebook page
The artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931-2007/1934-2015) set a benchmark in the history of photography with their work. Beginning in 1959, they collaborated almost continuously for decades on a joint oeuvre, developed across Germany, the Benelux countries, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the United States, and Canada. Their artistic style, characterised by a precise, documentary visual language and methodical systematisation, resonated significantly with movements such as Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. Against the backdrop of New Objectivity and inspired by 19th-century documentary photography, they created a visual grammar whose influence remains palpable in contemporary photography.
For the first time in Europe, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur presents an extensive retrospective featuring over 300 original black-and-white photographs and complementary exhibits, showcasing the formal and thematic breadth and depth of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work. The exhibition centers on the themes and methods developed by the Bechers: consistent methodical approaches to the photographic motif that evolved and were variably applied over decades. The exhibition explores how these methods emerged, how they developed, and how they reflected the Bechers’ perspective on the different shapes, functions, and integration of industrial buildings into the landscape.
Rare early works from both artists – created between the 1950s and 1970s – are on view, many for the first time. These pieces provide insight into the evolution of their shared aesthetic.
Room 2 is dedicated to the book Anonyme Skulpturen. Eine Typologie technischer Bauten (Anonymous Sculptures. A Typology of Technical Constructions), 1970, considered the foundation of their work. This publication systematically catalogued industrial structures and remains a key reference point. Quoted texts on the function of the objects and original prints illuminate its significance within their oeuvre.
Industrial Landscapes and photographs of entire sites form another focus and demonstrate that the Bechers did not merely document isolated buildings, but also functional and spatial relationships. Featured works include views of the Zollern 2 coal mine in Dortmund (published 1977) and the Ewald Fortsetzung mine in Recklinghausen (1982-1985).
The exhibition also includes “portraits” of residential and settlement houses from the Ruhr region – especially from the post-war era – reflecting the everyday life and environment of industrial workers. A framework house from the Siegerland region is used to show how a single subject can take on different meanings depending on presentation and context.
“Sequences” or “unfoldings” are illustrated using various building groups, presenting structures from multiple perspectives, so that a sculptural image of the motifs is created.
Lastly, the exhibition presents typologies – photographic series of coal bunkers, grain silos, winding and water towers, blast furnaces, and cooling towers. These highlight how the Bechers used specific representational strategies, systematic arrangement, and variation to achieve artistic expression. Created between the 1960s and early 2000s across different countries, the works powerfully demonstrate the visual grammar developed by the Bechers.
A kind of “cinematic epilogue” is provided by a video created by Max Becher, who accompanied his parents on a work trip to Ohio in 1987, offering an evocative glimpse into their working process.
The works are drawn from the Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur and the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio in Düsseldorf, directed by Max Becher. Additional loans are provided by Sprüth Magers and the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn.
A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, Munich, with texts by Max Becher, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Marianne Kapfer, and Urs Stahel. (Will be released in early November.)
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
Walker Evans (United States of America 1903-1975) Graveyard and steel mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 1935 Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing at left Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA 1986 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA 1986 (below)
With their blast furnaces, chimneys, pipes, and conveyor belts, steelworks are less buildings than gigantic machines. They are among the most imposing industrial structures that Bernd and Hilla Becher have photographed since the late 1950s. Anatomically speaking, blast furnaces are like a body without skin, the artist couple wrote in 1990: excessively high temperatures, too much pressure, too many gases make cladding the steel shell impossible; they are nothing but function. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the enormous work practically hangs over the town. Photographed from an elevated vantage point (similar to the one Walker Evans had chosen in 1935), the blast furnaces, houses, and the cemetery – work, life, death – are compressed into an inescapable proximity. Space compressed, time compressed.
Dr. Maria Müller-Schareck, art historian and member of the PS/SK management team
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
Installation views of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Zeche Ewald Fortsetzung, Kühlturm/-türme (Ewald mine continuation, cooling tower(s)) 1985 (below)
Over the course of their artistic career, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented approximately 200 industrial sites, including the Ewald Fortsetzung coal mine in Recklinghausen, which we are featuring in our exhibition.
These documentations are based on systematic walks through the industrial sites and surrounding areas. A panoramic photograph, often central to each site, provides an overview of the grounds and allows the individual buildings to be located and understood in relation to one another.
The subsequent photographs portray the individual building types, in this case, two cooling towers. The five images in this group clearly demonstrate how Bernd and Hilla Becher approach their subject, photographing the building from different sides and perspectives, and highlighting a specific detail. The aim of this approach was to depict the industrial buildings in a way that is both technically clear and aesthetically pleasing.
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne September, 2025 – February, 2026
Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method book cover
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Cologne Phone: +49 221/888 95 300
Curator: Maria L. Kelly, High Museum of Art assistant curator of photography
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37 1953 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Adair and Joe B. Massey in honour of Gus Kayafas
Aaron Siskind was recognised for the ways he rendered his surroundings into often stark shapes and forms, which reflected his fascination with contemporary trends in abstract art. He was an influential teacher at Chicago’s Institute of Design, which was founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. This image of a person flying or falling comes from a series Siskind made of the contorted bodies of divers plunging into Lake Michigan. He masterfully created its disorienting effect through tight focus on the floating figure without contextual elements.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
While contemporarily AI-powered technologies are revolutionising the way we interact with and consume media, enabling us to “to process and analyse vast amounts of data quickly, making it easier to find and access the information we need” in the 1920s and 1930s there was also a revolution in the way artists (and their use of the camera) viewed and felt the world – one not based on information, image quality or duplicity in the veracity of the image but one based on the word, perspective – be that point of view, context, close ups, surreality, fragmentation, scale, concept, construction, colour, aesthetics, identity, gender, or radical experimentation.
In this departure from traditional photographic methods, “New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.” (Press release)
To me, this New Vision is about experiencing different perspectives – experiencing, sensing, feeling and seeing the world in a new light. After the disasters and machine-ations, the destruction of a conservative way of life before the First World War, here was a way to grasp hold of (and picture) the speed of a new world order, the dreams of physiological analysis, the diversity of new identities, and the fluidity of rapidly evolving technological and social cultures.
While today this (r)evolution continues at an ever expanding pace with the consumption of huge amounts of information and images, I believe it may be advantageous to rest for a while on certain experiences and images … so that we let the daggers drop from our eyes, to ‘not make images’ in our minds eye but just to be present in the viewing of a photograph, so that we appreciate and understand every aspect of the great life spirit of this wondrous earth.
Then and now, new vision.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the High Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The New Vision movement of the 1920s and 1930s offered a revolutionary approach to seeing the world. It represented a rebellion against traditional photographic methods and an embrace of avant-garde experimentation and innovative techniques. László Moholy-Nagy, an artist and influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, named this period of expansion the “New Vision.” Today, the term encompasses photographic developments that took place between the two World Wars in Europe, America, and beyond. New Vision photographers foregrounded inventive techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints. These approaches – which also extended to more defined movements like Surrealism – spoke to a desire to find and see different perspectives in the wake of World War I.
Uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s photography collection, the exhibition traces the movement’s impact, from its origins in the 1920s to today, and demonstrates its long-standing effect on subsequent generations.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing
Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints.
This exhibition, uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s robust photography collection, will trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham, and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of works by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Installation views of the exhibition Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 – January 2026 Photos: Mike Jensen
The High Museum of Art presents “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” (June 13, 2025 – Jan. 4, 2026), an exhibition uniting more than 100 works from the High’s robust photography collection to trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Works include century-old photographs exemplifying themes from the movement and modern and contemporary images that emphasise the relevance of current artistic and social practices as a response to the technological and cultural changes that occurred in the early 20th century.
“This exhibition provides an opportunity to illuminate photographers’ creativity and innovative practices, all inspired by the progression of the medium in the 1920s and 30s,” said High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk. “Many of the works are rarely on view, so it will be an exciting experience for visitors to see them and learn about photographers’ abilities as they reflect reality while experimenting with technique and perspective.” Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.
“Experiments in Seeing” features nearly 100 photographers. It also demonstrates how the New Vision movement revolutionised the medium of photography in the early 20th century in response to the great societal, economic and technological shifts spurred by the upheaval of the two World Wars. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham and Moholy-Nagy have been complemented by a multitude of photographs by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.
The first section of the exhibition delves into experimental techniques that foreground the light-sensitive aspects of photography, followed by works created through in-camera manipulations or additions to the surfaces of the prints. Subsequent sections explore inventive methods of capturing unexpected views of the world articulated with radical angles or detailed close-ups. Other works showcase surreal approaches to subjects such as humanlike forms and bodies, the use of mirrors and doubling, and everyday scenes heightened by uncanny moments or distorted through the interplay of light, shadow and water.
“Not only does the early 20th century and its art movements continue to be influential, but that time also echoes our current moment – one that feels similarly consequential and innovative with the development of new emerging technologies and methods of communicating,” said Maria L. Kelly, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “The movements and happenings of a century ago are akin to those of today and those shown in the exhibition. There remains a desire for alternative ways to see and approach the world through art, and particularly through photography.”
“Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” is on view in the Lucinda W. Bunnen Galleries for Photography located on the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.
Press release from the High Museum of Art
“Light was considered the medium that permits photography. But for me it became the main subject: the protagonist of my photography.”
Ilse Bing, c. 1920s
Light Experimentation
After the trauma of World War I, many artists felt compelled to reconsider conventional art making methods to better reflect and engage with the world. Some photographers turned their attention to the essential element of photography: light. Through innovative visual investigations, cameraless photographs were produced, viewes of the world altered, and scientific discoveries made.
Experimentations with illumination and light-sensitive paper in the darkroom gave rise to photograms, enabling artists to pursue abstraction and to wield light as a sculptural element. The process of solarisation – reversing tones in a print using a flash of light during developing – provided an unconventional view of a subject. Early attempts to capture traces of light on film led to scientific innovations such as using strove lights to freeze movement, depicting magnetic fields, and tracing electrical currents on light sensitive paper.
These processes aim to reveal the invisible, with the elements of change as a constant companion. While artists can insert some control over the elements, the process ultimately shapes the final image. Many artworks in this section exist as unique prints, challenging the assumption of the reproducibility of photography, and emphasising the singularity of the creative moment.
Wall text from the exhibition
Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945) The Light That Never Was on Land or Sea c. 1925 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1977) Light Drawing #8 (Smoke) 1938-1939 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Hilary Leff and Elliot Groffman
Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized] 1943 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Estate of Ilse Bing Wolff
Inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor of photography who was fascinated with electromagnetic conduction, Hiroshi Sugimoto began applying charges of electricity directly to unexposed photographic film. After months of honing his technique in the darkroom, he managed to achieve remarkable results with a handheld wand charged by a generator. His Lightning Fields photographs are made without a camera or lens. Here, the abstract visual trace of an electric charge measuring over 400,000 volts sweeps across the composition, reading like the textures of a human hand, the upward tentacles of a fern, or the stark branches of a tree.
V. Elizabeth Turk is an Atlanta-based photographer whose work explores the connections between the human body and the natural world. To make this print, Turk used an analog process from the 1800s that involves coating a large sheet of paper with light-sensitive chemicals. She then arranged her model on top of the sheet and exposed it to light, creating a ghostly silhouette, before repeating the exposure with plants. The resulting photogram is a unique image in which botanical forms intersect with the body, alluding to bones, veins, and skin and suggesting a visceral bond between humans and the environment.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
“The limits of photography are incalculable; everything is so recent that even the mere act of searching may lead to creative results. […] The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen.”
László Moholy-Nagy 1928
Radical Viewpoints
From photography’s inception in 1839, camera technology involved cumbersome equipment and time-consuming development processes until the advent of lightweight cameras in the 1920s. Photographers were then able to work more nimbly, transforming photography into a medium capable of capturing fleeting moments, unusual viewpoints, and multiple perspectives. The exploration of unexpected angles became a hallmark of New Vision photography. Sharp diagonals, extreme vantage points, and shortened perspectives opened novel pathways of perceiving otherwise commonplace environments.
Alexander Rodchenko, a pioneer in this method, championed the camera’s ability to reveal, stating, “in order to teach man to see from all viewpoints, it is necessary to photograph […] from completely unexpected viewpoints and in unexpected positions […] We don’t see what we are looking at. We don’t see marvellous perspectives.” This approach aimed to provide a fuller impression of subjects, prompting viewers to seek and appreciate what might otherwise be overlooked.
Though these early photographs may not appear groundbreaking today, their makers’ carefully considered methods transferred how photography is used. This is evident in photographers’ creative interpretations of their surroundings over the past century.
Alexander Rodchenko was a key figure in the movements of New Vision and Constructivism – abstract and functional art that reflected an industrial society. Advocating “to achieve a revolution in our visual thought,” he explored various methods, such as photographing from unexpected angles, to capture dynamic views and expose new realities. With a new, lightweight 35 mm camera, he often photographed from his apartment balcony to create dramatic scenes of the street below. The perspective in this photograph flattens the building’s stories into one visual field, giving the image a theatrical quality as an onlooker peers over the railing.
A central figure among twentieth-century American photographers, Walker Evans created works in his early career that sample from the New Vision aesthetic, which he may have encountered while abroad in Paris in 1926. His photographs of New York City, made after he returned to the United States, feature dramatically angled or cropped scenes of architecture and city life. Evans made numerous photographic studies of the Brooklyn Bridge from both below and on the bridge, portraying it less as a recognisable landmark and more as a hulking expanse whose form fills each tight frame.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946) Stage Set for Madame Butterfly 1931 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation
Moholy-Nagy, a leader of the New Vision, had an expansive artistic practice that included painting, photography, sculpture, film, and more. As a teacher at the Bauhaus, which connected art and industry, he believed in technology’s potential to advance art and society. In 1929, he became set designer at the Kroll Opera House and created avant-garde sets with translucent and perforated materials, often making light itself a sculptural element. Lucia Moholy, a photographer, writer, teacher, and Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, was commissioned as Kroll’s stage photographer. In this image, which either artist may have made, the sharp angle shot from above complicates the set of Madame Butterfly, emphasising intersecting, moving elements and heightening areas of light and shadow.
Similar to the practice of using unusual angles to offer unexpected perspectives, some photographers began capturing highly detailed, close-up views of objects. This approach affords a study of texture, pattern, and structure that may otherwise go unnoticed by the human eye. By eliminating surroundings that could offer a narrative, the physicality of the object becomes the primary focus, allowing it to transcend beyond its everyday existence.
Practitioners of straight photography in the United States and the concurrent New Objectivity movement in Germany shared a core desire to unearth a balance of the familiar and the foreign within intricate images of forms. While Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston perfected carefully composed studies of plants and other natural matter, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alexander Rodchenko, and Ralph Steiner explored scientific and industrial objects. Such images celebrated the technological advancements of the time and revealed how mechanical structures often mimic those found in nature, suggesting a shared framework, and a shared beauty, between humanmade and natural. The emphasis on detail and abstraction invites viewers to reconsider their perceptions of both the ordinary and the extraordinary in the world around them.
Eugenia de Olazabal (Mexican, b. 1936) Espinas c. 1985 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the artist
“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”
Susan Sontag, 1973
Surreality
Surrealism emerged as an artistic movement in reaction to the horrors of World War I. The often disconcerting imagery and literature of the movement reflected a world that felt disorienting and chaotic and captured how the very foundations of reason and humanity were tested and questioned through the realities of war. In his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), French writer Andre Breton advocates for a rejection of rational ways of approaching the world in four of dreams and imagination as pathways to new creative expressions.
Photography played an important role in the Surrealist movement. Artists valued how the medium could capture spontaneous moments that reveal the unexpected, be manipulated to stage scenes, or be altered with darkroom processes. They harness photography in a multitude of ways to create dreamlike and unconscious associations with reality. In these galleries, artists explore uncanny moments and create links to the human psyche by focusing on humanlike forms and fragmented body parts, mirrored and doubled views, and the impact of light and shadows in space.
Eugène Atget was the great chronicler of Paris at the turn of the century. His vast photographic archive captures a city on the precipice of modernisation. Though his photographs of empty city streets were documentary in nature, the Surrealists admired their dreamlike quality and claimed Atget as one of their own despite his protestations. They believed any photograph could shed its original context and intent when viewed with a surrealist sensibility. Atget’s photograph of mannequins peering out of a shop window appealed to the movement by embodying the uncanny valley, where the human likeness of a nonhuman entity evokes both affinity and discomfort in viewers.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Florence Henri (Swiss born United States, 1893-1982) Composition 1932, printed 1972 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Dr. Joe B. Massey in honor of Maria L. Kelly
Florence Henri is well known for her manipulations of light and form that create complex, surrealist scenes. She used angled mirrors to frame, obscure, and replicate portions of scenes to dissolve a sense of perspective and space, as seen in this still life comprising mirrors, pears, and an image of the sea. After only one semester studying under László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in 1927, Henri shifted her focus from painting to photography and began using various experimental techniques such as photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing.
Barbara Kasten’s art is as much about the process of setting up innovative still life scenes as it is about the photographs she makes of them. Her Constructs series focuses on large-scale complex assemblages that she builds in her studio using a wide variety of materials, including painted wood, plaster, mirrors, screens, and fibers. Her work is not digitally altered; instead, she complicates the scene using mirrors and light, much in the tradition of Florence Henri, whose photograph is also on view in the exhibition.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Manipulations
This final section features photographers from the New Vision period to the present day who experiment with physically manipulating photographs. Through approaches such as double exposure, photomontage, surface alteration, and multilayering, they challenge and expand our perceptions of reality. The artworks in this section prioritise the creative process through labour, intention, intervention, and theatricality.
Double exposures is the process of photographing multiple images with the same negative within the camera, resulting in layered images that often provide a frenetic, multifaceted view of a scene. In contrast to the in-camera process of double exposure, photomontage combines separate images in the darkroom to produce a final photograph that emphasises the image’s artifice and absurdity. Physically disrupting the surface of photographs with alterations such as adding unnatural colour, drawing connections, stitching into prints, or inscribing texts augments the visual experience and offers emotional and narrative depth. Finally, whether through ancient visual techniques like the camera obscure or new technologies like digital screens, these artists create enigmatic scenes by layering and physically transforming subject, composition, and image.
Wall text from the exhibition
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Protest 1940 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase
Noémie Goudal (French, b. 1984) Phoenix V 2021 Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2023
Noémie Goudal visualises “deep time” (geological history of the planet) and paleoclimatology (study of past climates) to challenge our perception of the world. Referring to the ancient continental split two billion years ago that formed South America and Africa, this image features the Phoenix atlantica, a palm tree that grows on both sides of the Atlantic. Goudal arranged strips of photographic prints of the palms made on one continent in front of the physical palms on the other and rephotographed the scene. The resulting image interweaves the two continents, creating a glitchy, kaleidoscopic view meant to unsettle our sense of stability and the constancy of the planet.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Naima Green (American, b. 1992) It Lingers Sweetly 2022 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the LGBTQIA+ Photography Centennial Initiative
Naima Green’s practice centres connection and collaboration to cast a tender lens on her own queer community of colour. Her lyrical portraits take shape in intimate domestic spaces and airy outdoor environments that embody havens for the people in those spaces. Through double exposure and serial photographs, she provides what she calls “multiple entry points” into a moment in time, translating movements and emotions into a single image. She explains her interest in double exposure “as a means of capturing things that can’t be held in just one way … ,” allowing her to “play with loosening the narrative and letting go of some control.”
Text from the High Museum of Art website
The High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309
“Typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.” (Press release)
Every photo within a Becher grid contains its own difference.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fondazione Prada for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Despite protestations to the contrary (appeals to the objectivity of the image, eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion; the rigorous frontality of the individual images giving them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness) these are subjective images for all their objective desire. The paradox is the more a photographer strives for objectivity, the more ego drops away, the more the work becomes their own: subjective, beautiful, emotive.
“What happens in the case of mutation? Consider the example of the genetic code. Mutation normally occurs when some random event (for example, a burst of radiation or a coding error) disrupts an existing pattern and something else is put in its place instead. Although mutation disrupts pattern, it also presupposes a morphological standard against which it can be measured and understood as mutation. We have seen that in electronic textuality, the possibility for mutation within the text are enhanced and heightened by long coding chains. We can now understand mutation in more fundamental terms. Mutation is critical because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information.
We are now in a position to understand mutation as a decisive event in the psycholinguistics of information. Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern / randomness dialectic analogous to castration in the presence / absence dialectic. It marks a rupture of pattern so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can in longer be sustained. But as with castration, this only appears to be a disruption located at a specific moment. The randomness to which mutation testifies is implicit in the very idea of pattern, for only against the background of nonpattern can pattern emerge. Randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such.”
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 30-33
In the series Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 (People in the elevator, 20.11.1969) shot in 1969, Heinrich Riebesehl conceptualised his interest in the photographic portrait. The portraits of the workers of the Hannoversche Presse (a daily newspaper in Hanover) – taken inside an elevator with a remotely operated small-format camera – are dated and numbered in sequential order: Riebesehl dispensed with a title or a more detailed description of the subjects portrayed. By omitting distinctive elements from the images, such as the profession or age of the subjects, he made the situation the key factor in the shots. In fact, the images are studies of the behaviors of people in that particular space, their body languages and gazes. Riebesehl knew that environment very well, because he had worked for a long time as a photojournalist, before turning to conceptual art photography.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left Bernd and Hiller Becher’s Hochöfen (Blast furnaces) 1970-1989; and at right, Candida Höfer’s Bibliotheque Nationale de France XXIII 1997
In the photographs of libraries in London, Paris, and New York, which at first glance appear to be technically scientific records, Candida Höfer manages to capture something that is not visible: ingenuity. The libraries’ rooms have high ceilings, and the rows of seats are neatly arranged. In their impressiveness, they reflect the architecture of the 19th-century conception of knowledge and science, typical of the dominant nations of the time because of their commercial and colonial power. The objective nature of the deserted spaces, precisely in how they seem to be neutral to the individual needs of the students, suggests something in the image that could hardly be less objective: the possibility for intellectual exchange that these spaces promise and deliver in Höfer’s photographs.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
In Candida Höfer’s photographs shot in zoos, the animals document a specific form of loneliness in modern times. In these images, the lines of development of two disciplines collide. Not only in the photographs, but also in reality, they function independently of each other: modern architecture and behavioural research. Modern architecture has become established in zoological gardens but has never considered the animal and its needs. Based on the knowledge gained from behavioural research, by choosing to portray iconic large mammals such as giraffes, lions, and polar bears, Höfer has represented the dilemma of a world in which entire species are threatened with extinction and in which zoos see themselves as a kind of ‘Noah’s Ark.’
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Wassertürme (Water towers) 1966-1986
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Thomas Struth
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Thomas Struth with at left, Musée du Louvre IV Paris, 1989
In his practice, Thomas Struth demonstrates meticulous attention to the architectural environment, as well as to people and objects. In his large-format colour series Museum Photographs (1989-1992), Struth captures anonymous individuals and crowds gazing at artworks in museums. A significant example is Louvre 4, Paris 1989, in which the artist photographs from behind a group of viewers standing in front of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Often made with a large-format camera, his images reflect what Struth calls “exact vision”: the framing must not conceal anything or suggest secret content, thus resulting in an enigmatic outcome.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Andreas Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse 1993
Andreas Gursky’s large-format work, Paris, Montparnasse (1993) has become an iconic example of his work. It depicts the Maine-Montparnasse II block of flats, located on Rue Commandant-Mouchotte in Paris and built between 1959 and 1964 on a design by French architect Jean Dubuisson. This is one of the first images that Gursky created using digital post-production. In real life, the building does not look the way it appears in the image: using a digital editing process, Gursky transformed the façade into a game of differences and repetitions by processing the windows. In fact, by reiterating forms that are always identical, he produced a seemingly infinite number of them, with colour variations that are activated by a calculated dynamic.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent 1999
In 99 Cent (1999), Andreas Gursky photographed supermarket shelves using the same formal scheme used in Paris, Montparnasse (1993). The shelves crammed with everyday products such as detergents represent the inexhaustible flow of goods in the global system of production and distribution. Gursky’s work conveys a feeling of disorientation generated by the excessive stimuli and details typical of a shelf in a hypermarket.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) 99 Cent 1999 (remastered 2009) Inkjet print
“Typologien” is an extensive study dedicated to 20th-century German photography. The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.
The project attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorise and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century. Paradoxically, the given formal principle allows for unexpected convergences of German artists spanning different generations and the manifestation of their individual approaches.
The exhibition path will follow a typological rather than a chronological order, bringing together more than 600 photographic works by 25 established and lesser-known artists essential for recounting a century of German photography, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sibylle Bergemann, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Marianne Wex. A system of suspended walls will create geometric partitions in the exhibition space, forming unexpected connections between artistic practices that differ from each other, but are united by a common principle or intention of classification.
As stated by Susanne Pfeffer, “Only through juxtaposition and direct comparison is it possible to find out what is individual and what is universal, what is normative or real. Differences are evidence of the abundance of nature and the imagination of humans: the fern, the cow, the human being, the ear; the bus stop, the water tower, the stereo system, the museum. The typological comparison allows differences and similarities to emerge and the specifics to be grasped. Unknown or previously unperceived things about nature, the animal, or the object, about place and time become visible and recognisable.”
In photography, employing typologies means affirming an equivalence between images and the absence of hierarchies in terms of represented subjects, motifs, genres, and sources. Despite this, typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.
The hypothesis that photography plays a key role not only in fixing distinctive phenomena but also in organising and classifying a plurality of visible manifestations remains a vital force in today’s artistic efforts to navigate the complexity of our social and cultural realities. With the spread of digital imagery and practices, the concept of typology continues to be questioned and re-defined by contemporary photographers and artists.
As underlined by Susanne Pfeffer, “The unique, the individual, seems to have been absorbed into a global mass, the universality of things is omnipresent. The Internet allows typologies to be created in a matter of seconds. And yet this is precisely when it seems important – to artists – to take a closer look.” As further explained by Pfeffer, “When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to observe the past more closely. When everything seems to be shouting at you and becoming increasingly brutal, it is important to take a quiet pause and use the silence to see and think clearly. When differences are not seen as something other, but turned into something that divides us, it is crucial to notice what we have in common. Typologies allow us to identify remarkable similarities and subtle differences.”
Text from the Fondazione Prada website
Typologien | Fondazione Prada Milano
An extensive study dedicated to 20th-century German photography. “Typologien” attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorise and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century.
The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg was visiting convents and monasteries in Armenia when she happened to come across one of these unique bus stops, partly futuristic and partly surreal. From 1997 to 2011, she portrayed numerous bus stops, often in very remote locations. In a country that was experiencing a dramatic transition, from being part of the Soviet Union to its new status as an independent republic, these bus stops look like the remnants of a utopian socialism, which in Schulz-Dornburg’s images are kept alive mainly by women and children. The photographer said she was so impressed by the dignity of those women waiting at the bus stop, who even in the most extreme poverty looked as though they were on their way to the Opera, that she asked their permission to photograph them. What emerged was a document of a quiet life that manages with dignity to deal with even the harshest adversity.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition ‘Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany’ at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left, flower photographs by Thomas Struth; and at right, Andreas Gursky’s Untitled XVIII 2015 (below)
Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) Untitled XVIII 2015 Inkjet print Atelier Andreas Gursky
Unlike works such as Paris, Montparnasse (1993), in the Untitled series he produced between 2015 and 2016, Andreas Gursky depicted rows of tulips without providing a title or location for the pictures. Viewed from a distance, the photographs are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist paintings, but even looking at them at close range, the lushly blooming flowers are undiscernible. Living in Düsseldorf, close to the Dutch border, Gursky is familiar with the intensively cultivated Dutch tulip crops, where no unwanted insect or worm would possibly be allowed to spoil the bulbs. The sterility of industrial flower production, far from being harmless and healthy, is captured by Gursky in images that, in turn, are neither reassuring nor pleasant.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the flower photographs of Thomas Struth with at left, Small Closed Sunflower, No. 18, Winterthur 1992 (below); and at third left, Single Red Lily – No. 51, Düsseldorf (Botanischer Garten) 1993 (below)
A student of the artist Gerhard Richter and later of the photographer Bernd Becher at the Art Düsseldorf Academy from 1973 to 1980, Thomas Struth habitually works in thematic cycles centered around museums, flowers, and portraits of families and passers-by. The “exact vision” – the intention underpinning Struth’s photography – can be seen in both the portraits of two cornflowers shoot in Düsseldorf and the image of a red lily in the city’s Botanical Garden. Struth notes down the name or address of the site where he took the photograph, as in the case of the flower of a hollyhock portrayed in Düsseldorf’s Nordpark. This is to evoke the poetry of the place and provide an exact account of the plants’ origin, preserving the authenticity of the shots without digitally altering them.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Hiller Becher
In terms of the objectivity of the approach, Hilla Becher’s 1965 photographic studies of an oak leaf, a cypress branch, and a ginkgo leaf are in keeping with the series on types of industrial buildings that she made with her husband Bernd Becher. Thematically, however, these studies represent a sort of return to the studies of branches and shoots made years earlier by Karl Blossfeldt. Unlike Blossfeldt’s images, the leaves, particularly the poplar leaves, are not uniformly lit. The shadowy areas cannot be clearly seen with the naked eye even on close and objective observation. One could say that nature has penetrated the technique, disappearing.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel [Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds] Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Berlin University of Arts, Archive – Karl Blossfeldt Collection in cooperation with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
The young, still curling fronds of an ‘Unspecified fern’ are a kind of introduction to the themes that Karl Blossfeldt explored, and his working methods. Faced with a seemingly infinite variety of natural forms, the photographer tried to find an order by using tools borrowed from scientific botany. Blossfeldt collected plant samples tirelessly in and around Berlin, dried them, and enlarged those details not visible to the naked eye. However, the photographer was seeking something different from the aims of botanical research. This is already revealed by the title of the first volume, a publication of his photographs of plants – Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Plants, 1928). Right from the title, he explicitly refers to the model he used for the book’s conception: Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen in der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), published in 1924 and now a classic. Therefore, Blossfeldt sought archetypal formal models in nature, such as the fronds of the fern.
In his search for a primal form of nature that could then be shaped into art according to the natural model – as in the case of the curled fronds of the fern – Karl Blossfeldt applied the systematic method specific to botany with a kind of exterior mimicry. He moved from the frond of an unidentified fern, in other words, not yet classified according to an order, to a fern that could at least be identified within a botanical classification. The frond of the order Polypodiales certainly has typological similarities to all the fronds photographed by Blossfeldt, but it remains a case apart in that it cannot be classified in any of the orders in which the other ferns are classified. However, this level of identification is a relevant indication: these very diverse plants in fact number about 9000 known species, and probably many more yet to be identified. Moreover, identifying their species is often only possible for a few specialists, and is even more difficult given the variety of forms that ferns take during their development.
The curled fronds of some ferns from the Osmundaceae family, royal ferns, with their botanical classification, confirm one of the fundamental intentions of Karl Blossfeldt’s studies: only by carefully analyzing the structure of a plant can one fully understand its natural form. He developed his approach opposite to that of the Jugendstil, the artistic movement – a variation of French Art Nouveau and Italian Liberty – that stylized plant forms and conceived of them primarily as ornamental elements. Blossfeldt was not interested in criticism or rejection of the ornamental, but in a radical reconfiguration of it. This could only be achieved by thoroughly studying natural forms.
Three still-curled fronds of a specimen of bracken fern – scientific name Hypolepidaceae – on the one hand, appear denaturalised, because Karl Blossfeldt focused his lens on the detail, leaving out the natural context. But on the other hand, they reveal a scrupulous observation of the plant world. By nature, in fact, fronds develop according to a strict formal principle – no natural form is purely random – and yet they eventually differ from one another. The fronds of ferns could appear as decalcomanias, given that in Blossfeldt’s representation they take on an almost mechanical quality for the observer. The emphasis on differences in resemblance, which Blossfeldt achieved more or less consciously by repeating the leaf motif in differently shaped ferns, can be considered one of the main aesthetic innovations of his photography.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Marianne Wex with at left, Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures 1977-2018 (below); and at right, Arm and Leg Positions, Lying on the Ground 1977/2018
With the photographic project Let’s Take Back our Space, which resulted in a book published in 1979 with the subtitle “‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures,” Marianne Wex produced one of the seminal works in 1970s feminist art studies. Starting with a scrupulous observation of the body influenced by the method of structuralism, a scientific approach that studies a whole by breaking it down into elements and units, Wex took hundreds of photographs arranged in specific thematic sections devoted, for example, to specific leg and arm positions. Wex succeeded in showing how apparently natural body postures are actually the result of centuries of social and cultural structures, not a ‘natural’ or genetic predisposition. Her photographs capture movements, postures, and gestures, documenting habits of the body that have been taught and passed down for generations, shaping the behaviour of men and women according to patriarchal expectations.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Marianne Wex (German, 1937-2020) Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures 1977-2018 Inkjet print
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing photographs from Wolfgang Tillmans’ series Concorde 1997
In 1997, Wolfgang Tillmans photographed the Concorde, a supersonic passenger plane, in flight during landing and take-off. For him, the plane represented one of the last remaining inventions of the 1960s technological utopia. With its futuristic shape, supersonic speed, and the formidable roar it made during take-off and landing, the plane fascinated generations of technology enthusiasts. Today, the Concorde is a thing of the past and, together with the Titanic, epitomises more of a technological shock than a promise in the history of technology. These photographs reveal one of the aspects that Tillmans wants to highlight: they are symbols of “a super-modern anachronism” that ultimately left nothing behind but air pollution and environmental destruction.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) Concorde L449-21 1997 Inkjet print Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz
Fondazione Prada presents Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, an extensive study dedicated to 20-century German photography, at its Milan venue from 3 April to 14 July 2025. The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.
The exhibition attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorise and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century. Paradoxically, the given formal principle allows for unexpected convergences of German artists spanning different generations and the manifestation of their individual approaches.
The exhibition path follows a typological rather than a chronological order, bringing together more than 600 photographic works by 25 artists essential for recounting over a century of German photography. The exhibition features photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sibylle Bergemann, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Marianne Wex. The project forms unexpected connections between artistic practices that differ from each other but are united by a common principle or intention of classification.
As stated by Susanne Pfeffer, “Only through juxtaposition and direct comparison is it possible to find out what is individual and what is universal, what is normative or real. Differences are evidence of the abundance of nature and the imagination of humans: the fern, the cow, the human being, the ear; the bus stop, the water tower, the stereo system, the museum. The typological comparison allows differences and similarities to emerge and the specifics to be grasped. Unknown or previously unperceived things about nature, the animal, or the object, about place and time become visible and recognizable.”
In photography, employing typologies means affirming an equivalence between images and the absence of hierarchies in terms of represented subjects, motifs, genres, and sources.
Despite this, typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.
The hypothesis that photography plays a key role not only in fixing distinctive phenomena but also in organizing and classifying a plurality of visible manifestations remains a vital force in today’s artistic efforts to navigate the complexity of our social and cultural realities. With the spread of digital imagery and practices, the concept of typology continues to be questioned and re-defined by contemporary photographers and artists.
As underlined by Susanne Pfeffer, “The unique, the individual, seems to have been absorbed into a global mass, the universality of things is omnipresent. The Internet allows typologies to be created in a matter of seconds. In this very precise moment – it seems even more important to follow the artists’ gaze and look closely.” As further explained by Pfeffer, “When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to look closer at the past. When everything seems to be shouting at you and becoming increasingly brutal, it is important to take a quiet pause and use the silence to see and think clearly. When differences are no longer perceived seen as something other but are transformed into elements of division, we have to recognize what we have in common. Typologies allow us to identify undeniable similarities and subtle differences.”
In the early 20th century, Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was one of the first artists to transfer the classification system used in botanical studies to photography. His vast and detailed plant atlas represented a foundational moment for German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This artistic and photographic movement emerged in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic and promoted the importance of categories and distinctions and the remarkable ability of photography as a medium to explore the very idea of typology.
Another pioneering figure was August Sander (1876-1964), who published his photo book Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) in 1929, at the time excerpted from his landmark project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century). Described by Walter Benjamin as a “training atlas” of physiognomic perception, Antlitz der Zeit was an ambitious attempt to portray the diversity and the structure of German society using class, gender, age, occupation, and social background as distinct categories of a rigid and neutral classification system.
Both Karl Blossfeldt’s and August Sander’s typologies were fundamental for Bernd Becher (1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (1934-2015) when, at the end of the fifties, they began an enormous and lifelong documentation and preservation project of industrial architecture. In 1971, they described the “industrial constructions” as “objects, not motifs”. They stated that “the information we want to provide is only created through the sequence, through the juxtaposition of similar or different objects with the same function”. Their black-and-white monuments, or “anonymous sculptures”, isolated against a monochromatic sky, centered, framed in the same format and arranged in a block, became an essential reference for American and European Post-Minimalist and Conceptual artists. They also represented a rich heritage for younger generations of German artists and photographers, such as Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Candida Höfer (b. 1944), Simone Nieweg (b. 1962), Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) and Thomas Struth (b. 1954), who studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf in the class led by Bernd and Hilla Becher from 1976.
Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941-2023), internationally recognised for his fundamental contribution to conceptual art, traced a complementary trajectory in German photography. In his works, he documented everyday objects and historical events and combined deadpan humor with a systematic approach to accumulating, cataloguing, and rearranging elements of contemporary visual culture. In his series, he invented personal yet very political typologies and adopted a deliberate snapshot approach with a commercial aesthetic. For his work Alle Kleider einer Frau (All the Clothes of a Woman, 1975), he took 35mm-format photographs of underwear, hosiery, T-shirts, dresses, trousers, skirts, socks, and shoes, all hanging on hangers on the wall or laid on dark fabric. With his project Die Toten 1967-1993 (The Dead 1967-1993, 1996-1998), he paid homage to individuals murdered in the context of the political and terroristic movements in Post-War Germany. As pointed out by Susanne Pfeffer, “With his typologies, he emphasised the equal value of all photographs, their image sources and motifs, and underscored the de-hierarchisation inherent in every typology.”
In his apparently random collection of found, personal or pornographic images, press clippings, and historical photos of Nazi concentration camps, the Red Army Faction and German reunification, a “private album” named Atlas (1962 – present), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) seemed to deny or challenge the very idea of typology. Instead, he took the principle of equivalence between images and their trivialization process to the limits, creating a jarring contrast and an acute awareness of a repressed collective memory.
In the seventies and eighties, in a dialectic relationship with the artistic lessons of the Bechers, Gursky, Höfer, Ruff, and Struth progressively abandoned the radicalism and black- and-white purism of their professors. They explored the colorful dominance of banality in their series of individual or family portraits, monumental and detailed city views, and spectacular documentation of cultural or tourist sites, generating a plethora of contemporary and conflicting typologies.
In the late seventies and early eighties, multimedia artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) engaged in a direct dialogue with the photographic medium. In 1979, she created a series entitled Hi-Fi that featured advertisements of avant-garde Japanese stereo equipment, organising them in an imaginary commercial catalog. The second series entitled Ohr (Ear) (1980) depicted, in large-scale colour close-ups, the ears of random women Genzken photographed on the streets of New York City. She transferred the traditional portrait genre to physiognomic detail and ironically investigating the absolute singularity and infinite individual differentiation the photographic portrait can record.
An illustrated book, published by Fondazione Prada and designed by Zak Group, accompanies the exhibition “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”. It includes an introduction by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, a text by the exhibition curator Susanne Pfeffer and three essays by renowned international art historians and curators Benjamin Buchloh, Tom Holert, and Renée Mussai.
Press release from Fondazione Prada
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of August Sander
The series that August Sander dedicated to women is perhaps where the idea of categorising an archetype or social type shows the cracks most visibly. Whether it is an architect’s companion, an industrialist’s wife, or a high society lady, in Sander’s images the individuality of the female subject, in dress and posture, always prevails over type. And even when the subjects display characteristics that could be traced back to their class, origin, or occupation – such as the secretary who smokes – all the women depicted, from the sculptor to the photographer or the gym teacher, express ‘their own’ individuality. This is most evident when comparing the portraits of women with those of civil servants, whose gazes already show a serial uniformity associated with their positions.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
In 1935, Erich Sander, August Sander’s son, was sensationally put on trial and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for subversive activities. He served most of his sentence in Siegburg Prison, where he worked as the prison’s photographer. Determined to continue his resistance activities even in prison, he did not limit himself to taking ‘official’ photographs. He convinced his fellow prisoners to show him the scars of torture and have their portraits taken. Those photographs seemed to him to be in line with his father’s work. He had learned his trade from his father and worked with him before his imprisonment. He stayed in close contact with his parents during his ten years of imprisonment, and through them, managed to get many of those images out of the prison, leaving a valuable record of Nazi atrocities. Due to a misdiagnosis and lack of medical treatment during his imprisonment, Erich Sander died in 1944, six months before the end of his sentence.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing photographs by Thomas Struth with at left, The Richter Family 1, Cologne 2002; and at right, The Consolandi Family, Milan 1996
Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954) The Richter Family 1, Cologne (installation view) 2002 C-print Courtesy of the artist
Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954) The Richter Family 1, Cologne 2002 C-print Courtesy of the artist
Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954) The Consolandi Family, Milan (installation view) 1996 C-print Courtesy of the artist
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Thomas Ruff portraits
Between 1977 and 1985, Thomas Ruff studied with Bernd Becher at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he himself has been teaching photography since 2000. During the 1980s, he photographed people from his circle of acquaintances in a series of identically framed shots. With the subjects portrayed in a half-length pose against a neutral background, the images are striking for their unusually large size. Every detail, every pore, and every imperfection in the skin is visible in the faces of the subjects, whose names Ruff also provides. The strictness of the composition, the uniform lighting, and the impassive gaze of the people portrayed give the images an objective and neutral atmosphere. What formally appears detached and unemotional immediately raises questions about the subject portrayed: who is this person? What does he or she do in life? With this series, Ruff challenges the conventions of the traditional portrait, encouraging the viewer to question not only the identity of the subject, but also the role of the photographer and the meaning of the portrait itself.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left, Jochen Lempert’s The Skins of Alca Impennis 1992-2022; and at right, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait of Pia Stadtbäumer and Portrait of Simone Buch both 1988
Jochen Lempert (German, b. 1958) The Skins of Alca Impennis (detail) 1992-2022 Gelatin silver prints on Bartya paper 54 parts Courtesy of Jochen Lempert, BQ, Berlin, and ProjecteSD, Barcelona
The fifty-four profiles of the Alca impennis (the great auk), a large flightless bird that became extinct after its last sighting in 1852, are part of a project that took Jochen Lempert more than a decade to complete. Using the same methods, Lempert photographed the profiles of many of the seventy-eight specimens of the Alca impennis preserved in natural history collections. Having become increasingly rare due to hunting, the Alca impennis was increasingly coveted by collectors, so the skins of this species fetched very high prices. The presence of such a large number of stuffed specimens in collections was therefore one of the causes of this species’ extinction.
Lempert’s portraits also hint at a more significant phenomenon. Very marked individual variations can be found in the appearance of individual specimens of a species, testifying to the great degree of differentiation within the species. Therefore, the concept of species, or its depiction in a scientific classification book, provides something akin to an ‘ideal type,’ rather than a true representation of the actual variety found in real life.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Rosemarie Trockel, Elena I & II, 1993/2025, Maculata I & II, 1993/2025, Mela I & II, 1993/2025
The portraits of the dogs Mela, Elena, and Maculata grew out of Rosemarie Trockel’s interest in animals and the relationship between animals and humans, a subject she has been working with for a long time. From the drawings of monkeys, which represent a kind of monument to the profound melancholy of primates kept in captivity by humans, to A House for Pigs and People / Ein Haus føur Schweine und Menschen created with Carsten Höller for documenta X in 1997, Trockel’s exploration of the relationship between humans and animals involves various forms of expression and themes. However, in this case, the double portraits of the three dogs, photographed frontally and in profile, indicate a further correlation. If “every animal is an artist,” as Trockel has stated, these portraits seem to call these roles into question: who directs and who stages who? Does the artist portray the dogs or do the dogs direct the artist?
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left, the work of Ursula Böhmer and her series All Ladies – Cows in Europe, 1998-2011; and at right, the work of Isa Genzken and her series Ohr, 1980
Getting a cow to stand still in a frontal pose and look towards the camera, as Ursula Böhmer managed to do with a Highlander in the Grampian Mountains, is certainly not an easy task, but one that requires patience and trust, one of the prerequisites for this project. Between 1998 and 2011, Böhmer visited 25 European countries to photograph specimens of cattle breeds in the places where their breeding history began. These breeds, many of them at risk of extinction, had to be portrayed in their own environments in order to illustrate how these environments had influenced their appearance. What emerged was a series of images of docile animals portrayed in often harsh landscapes, which at the same time document the ongoing conditioning by the environment on the forms of life also in breeding conditions.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
In 1980, Isa Genzken took a series of close-ups of the ears of women she encountered on the streets of New York. The typical portraiture approach used in the photographs exalts and enhances the characteristics of the represented subject, on the one hand, but at the same time, with the anonymity of the immortalized figure, creates a contrast. In the course of the evolution of the human species, the ear has lost its value in terms of expressive power. While in many animal species ears still play an important role in expressing emotions, in the human being they are stiffly positioned at the sides of the head and no longer react to emotional states along with the facial muscles. Georg Simmel, a sociologist of the senses, sees the ear as merely a passive appendage in the human appearance. For Simmel, the ear is the selfish organ par excellence, which simply takes without giving. Genzken contradicts this verdict, because the ears she photographs, with all the ornaments attached, eloquently express individual differences.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
In her first institutional exhibition, presented at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld in 1979, alongside sculptures and drawings, Isa Genzken exhibited a photography series dedicated to the latest and most expensive Hi-Fi systems. She created it by cutting out ads for turntables and amplifiers from international magazines and then photographing them. As she told photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in an interview, those advertisements showcased some of the most advanced technology of the time, highlighting cutting-edge design. Genzken also stated that a sculpture should be at least as modern as those devices. Her photography series dedicated to Hi-Fi systems can therefore be interpreted as a conceptual and aesthetic investigation of whether or not her sculptures and works could be compared to the everyday beauty of a stereo system.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-2010) Handschuhpalme (Glove palm tree) 1966 From the series … Höhere Wesen Befehlen, 1968 (… Higher beings Command, 1968) 13 stampe offset su carta artistica / 13 offset prints on art paper MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt am Main
Lotte Jacobi, known for her portraits of intellectuals including Martin Buber and W.E.B du Bois, artists such as Marc Chagall, and poets including Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky, created a series of plant portraits in 1930. Apart from the individual flowers of the Orchis latifolia, the broad-leaved helleborine or orchid, and Neottia nidus avis, the bird’s nest, she photographed an orchid in its entirety. The names of the plants, which Jacobi, like Karl Blossfeldt, makes explicit in the titles of the photographs, are an integral part of the unique poetics of the subjects. With her plant portraits, Jacobi followed in the tradition of the 1920s workers’ movement’s vision of nature. In fact, Jacobi was a member of the Vereinigung der Arbeiterfotografen Deutschlands (Union of German Labor Photographers), an organisation of photographers who documented the social life and struggles of the German working class.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
In his photography, Thomas Struth has always been interested in the streets, squares, and houses of cities that consciously or unconsciously shape our experience, as well as that of the passers-by who walk through them. The study People on the Street, Düsseldorf 1974-78 explores the movements and figures of individuals passing in front of the camera lens. The subjects are never shot at close range. While some facial features are blurred in movement, others are clearly visible. Even if they are differentiated by their jackets, coats, or bags, all the subjects have a directional gait in common. No one is simply ‘here’: they all have an intention, which each person pursues in their own way.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Untitled (Kindergarten) 1928 Gelatin silver print Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Berlin Permanent loan from the Federal Republic of Germany represented by the Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
Umbo – born Otto Umbehr – found his expressive tool in the camera in 1926. In the early 1920s he studied at the Bauhaus with the intention of becoming a painter, until Walter Gropius, the director of the Institute, expelled him from the school for improper conduct. He then found in photography the medium that allowed him to work with his distinctive play of light and shadow. Photographs such as Unheimliche Straße (Eerie Street, 1928), Am Strand (auch Strandleben) (On the beach [also beach life], 1930) and Ohne Titel (Kindergarten) (Untitled [Kindergarten], 1930) epitomize his artistic innovations. There is nothing random in these images: everything has been composed. Umbo’s photographs are the opposite of snapshots or shots that capture the emotion of a moment; they express a formal intent without overpowering reality. Therefore, with all their poetry, they retain an abstract component. What clearly surfaces in this primacy of composition is his connection to the Bauhaus philosophy, which emphasised design and structure over emotion or spontaneity.
Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann
Fondazione Prada Milan Largo Isarco 2, within the Podium spaces 20139 MILAN Phone: +39 02 5666 2611
The work of Tata Ronkholz belongs to the Düsseldorf School of Photography which refers to a group of photographers who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the mid 1970s with teachers Bernd and Hiller Becher – whose conceptual rationale for an objective excellence for art photography emerged from the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) modern realist movement of the 1920s.
“This [objective] conceptualisation opens up an expanded terrain of becoming for photography … The work of these artists is vital to an understanding of the place of photography within the observation, construction and taxonomy of contemporary culture and its pictorial representation.”1
Ronkholz’s photographs are images of infinite focus … where the attention of the photographer is tightly controlled as to the conceptualisation of the image and the constructed reality that is being re/presented.
Ronkholz was aware of the importance of these ephemeral structures, the importance of documenting them, these industrial gates, kiosks and small shops, which arise and then are gone. Here today, gone tomorrow (much like life itself). “These often small, sometimes freestanding structures, with their designs, surroundings, product offerings, and advertisements, serve as vivid testaments to everyday culture.”2
And testaments to the transitory nature of contemporary culture.
I love these photographs of everyday things for their clear seeing, their frontality, their directness, which allows the viewer to address a reality which might have passed them by as they walk the streets in a dream.
2/ Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne website
Many thankx to Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
An exhibition by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in collaboration with the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf and VAN HAM Art Estate
The artist and photographer Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997) will be honoured in the spring with her first major retrospective. She is one of the first members of the class taught by Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Due to her early death Ronkholz’s work has long been recognised only partly even though her oeuvre reflects a profound and continuous engagement with multiple themes. Ronkholz is best known for her series of kiosks and small shops in the Rhineland and Ruhr area, which she began in 1977. These often small, sometimes freestanding structures, with their designs, surroundings, product offerings, and advertisements, serve as vivid testaments to everyday culture. Additionally, she created a photographic series documenting various industrial gates. Together with her fellow student Thomas Struth, she documented Düsseldorf’s Rheinhafen district from 1979 to 1981 before its transformation into the so-called “Medienhafen”.
The exhibition will also feature surprising insights into Ronkholz’s early works as a freelance product designer and photographs of architectural forms taken in Italy. An accompanying catalog will be published.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne website
This retrospective is the first comprehensive tribute to the versatile work of Tata Ronkholz (born 1940 in Krefeld; died 1997 in Hürth-Kendenich, née Maria Juliana Roswitha Tölle). The exhibition features works by the photographer, product designer, and interior architect who was one of the early students of the Becher class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Among her fellow students were renowned artists such as Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Petra Wunderlich. Ronkholz’s estate, acquired in 2011 by VAN HAM Art Estate in Cologne, forms the basis of the exhibition alongside the holdings of Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf. Significant contributions have also been made from the in-house collections of Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur and from other lenders.
The retrospective finds its stylistically fitting context in the Photographic Collection, with the on-site Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive. Ronkholz’s works follow in the tradition of objective, documentary photography – a tradition decisively shaped by the Bechers. Her work is characterised by clear compositions, a serial approach, and a documentary focus on architectural structures and everyday architectures. Using her large-format camera, she produced sharply defined and realistic photographs in which the subject matter, rather than the photographer’s personal signature, takes center stage. Her work is predominantly in black and white, although color images also appear, demonstrating her ambition to engage with the emerging artistic colour photography in Germany during the 1970s and 80s.
Tata Ronkholz became known for her appealing series of kiosks and small shops that capture typical moments of urban everyday culture. These were photographed between 1977 and 1985, particularly in neighborhoods of Cologne and Düsseldorf, in the Ruhr area, as well as in Leverkusen and Krefeld. For example, the kiosk in Cologne-Nippes – with its ice cream and newspaper advertisements and vending machines for chewing gum and cigarettes – is captured in a straightforward, unadorned manner that is as amusing and engaging as the boutique in Cologne-Mülheim on Berliner Straße 120, where, according to the store sign, alongside clothing, “Third World records” were also offered. Many details in the images evoke personal memories – perhaps a shopping trip to a Turkish grocery store or an ice cream sundae at Eiscafé Fortuna. The photographs illustrate the transformation of product offerings, decoration, and advertising in urban spaces. The depicted details remind viewers of their own surroundings and provide insight into the shopping habits of past decades.
In this way, the subjects in Tata Ronkholz’s work indirectly testify to social, cultural, and economic change while also revealing how the personal tastes of shop owners influenced the design of these small retail outlets. Viewed in this light, her images offer a vivid basis for a sociological examination of our own species, addressing fundamental societal questions: What needs did we have and do we have? What did we need and do we need to live? How do we shape our surroundings? What role do images play?
Another significant series is dedicated to industrial gates, photographed between 1977 and 1985. The simple black-and-white images of these gates, with their grids and frameworks, offer glimpses into the interiors of industrial areas, their graphic structure appearing almost abstract. In the photographs, the gates function as interfaces between private and public space, between interior and exterior, and between activity and calm. Their aesthetic, reminiscent of abstract artworks, imbues the everyday with a new significance.
A particularly impressive documentary series is the body of work on the Düsseldorf Rhine Harbor, which Ronkholz began in 1979 together with her then fellow student Thomas Struth. The project originated from the planned redevelopment of the historic harbor area – a site that, in its original form, was considered an industrial area of significant urban historical and architectural importance. Struth observed the initial changes from his studio and convinced Tata Ronkholz to join the project. Together, they set out to document the harbor in its entirety, capturing its historic buildings, technical installations, and operational structures. They recorded façades, interiors, silos, warehouses, crane structures, and harbor basins in carefully composed images, before these elements partially disappeared or were fundamentally altered during the restructuring. The photographs strikingly showcase the industrial architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries while simultaneously highlighting the transformation from a center of commerce and production to today’s media harbor. Overall, this critically composed documentation of the Düsseldorf Rhine Harbor stands as an exemplary case for the complex issues of urban redevelopment in other locations as well.
In addition, the exhibition presents works that highlight Ronkholz’s achievements as a product designer, including depictions of geometrically shaped furniture and lighting fixtures as well as designs for office and cafeteria furniture. Between 1961 and 1965, she studied at the Werkkunstschule Krefeld with a focus on furniture design and subsequently worked as a freelance designer until 1977. Her designs are characterised by clear forms and functional elegance, as exemplified by the “Spherical Light” developed in collaboration with Adolf Luther, featuring a convex glass element. Finally, the retrospective also presents early photographs of architectural forms created in 1975/76 in Italy and France. Even in these works, her strong affinity for the aspects of the designed world across various areas of life becomes apparent.
Accompanying the exhibition is the catalog Tata Ronkholz: Designed World. A Retrospective published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, featuring texts by renowned authors (ger/en). The exhibition is supported by the City of Düsseldorf and VAN HAM Cologne.
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
“Although these artists were explicitly not dealing with mundane reality but instead with what lies beneath, behind and in-between, the still relatively new medium of photography was of great importance for many. Last but not least, they also used it to make visible what remains hidden to the naked eye without technical means: the distant, the tiny, the moving.” (Press release)
Expressing the unconscious mind through illogical, dreamlike imagery and ideas, exploring the irrational, challenging notions of reality through a technical instrument – the camera – to create “a rich and multifarious cosmos of idiosyncratic realities that radically transcended traditional aesthetics.”
In the dream of the mind and the camera’s eye. Over and above the real.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Fotografie for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The invention of modern photomontage in the early twentieth century by Max Ernst with his Dada colleagues Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann established new history in a variety of ways. Expanding modern art with multimedia as well as placing found photographs into art cut from printed magazines, rather than chemical made prints from the darkroom. Redefining final works of art without the paint brush or canvas. Ernst freed imagery into the unconscious by self-made combinations of drawing with torn and pasted photographic fragments, evoking memories and other responses by viewers that continue today.”
Steve Yates, Fulbright scholar, photographic artist, author and curator
Max Ernst holds a prominent position within Dada and Surrealist Art. His name stands for genre-bending works that combine dream and reality. The exhibition FOTOGAGA: Max Ernst and Photography. A Visit from the Würth Collection is the first to search for points of intersection between his work and photography. Commemorating Surrealism’s centenary, the Museum für Fotografie (Museum of Photography) is showing a representative overview of Max Ernst’s artworks from the Würth Collection. These are complemented by works from the Kunstbibliothek, Kupferstichkabinett, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and other exceptional loans from museums and private collections in France and Germany.
Max Ernst and Photography – A Special Connection
The art of Max Ernst (1891-1976) was created at a time characterised by a new, creative approach to photography. Snapshots, scientific photographs and images of war machinery inspired him and served as working materials, especially for his collages. Technical and artistic developments in the medium of photography significantly influenced his work. He used photographic reproduction techniques to increase the visual impact of his works: enlargements allowed his small-format collages to hold their own alongside paintings in exhibitions; the production of photo postcards of the collages ensured that the works could be distributed quickly and easily; and the inversion of the tonal values in a photogram enhanced the effect of his frottages.
Max Ernst himself never used a camera for his art, but he liked to pose for the camera, whether for images taken by well-known photographers or made in photo booths. At times serious, at times a little “gaga”, the portraits illustrate not just the artist’s love for playfulness but also an occasionally strategic use of photography to promote his artistic agenda. The title of the exhibition – “FOTOGAGA” – is derived from a group of works by Hans Arp and Max Ernst, which they called “FATAGAGA”: the “FAbrication de TAbleaux GAsométriques Garantis (Fabrication of Guaranteed Gasometric Images)”. One of these photocollages, in which the two artists address their relationship as friends, can be seen in the exhibition.
A Century of Surrealism
Some 270 works will be exhibited, primarily works on paper but also paintings by Max Ernst and photographs, photograms, collages, and illustrated books by his Surrealist contemporaries. Although these artists were explicitly not dealing with mundane reality but instead with what lies beneath, behind and in-between, the still relatively new medium of photography was of great importance for many. Last but not least, they also used it to make visible what remains hidden to the naked eye without technical means: the distant, the tiny, the moving.
Max Ernst’s works are framed within the context of both contemporary and historical references. There are numerous and surprising parallels to photographs by other artists. An avid delight in experimentation and a creative game played with chance characterise the works selected for the exhibition. Their originators reflected on forgotten photographic processes from the 19th century and developed new techniques using light-sensitive materials. Semi-automatic methods, working with found objects, unusual combinations, and the blurring of traces have equally shaped the work of Max Ernst and the photographic oeuvres of many of his contemporaries and other artists that followed. Even a century after André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto on 15 October 1924, they have not lost any of their fascination.
A cooperation with tradition
The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin look back on a longstanding cooperation with the Würth Collection. FOTOGAGA: Max Ernst and Photography is the fourth exhibition in a series that began in 2019‒2020 with Anthony Caro: The Last Judgement Sculpture from the Würth Collection at the Gemä-ldegalerie. It was followed in 2021‒2022 by Illustrious Guests: Treasures from the Kunstkammer Würth in the Kunstgewerbemuseum and David Hockney – Landscapes in Dialogue. “The Four Seasons” from the Würth Collection in 2022, also shown at the Gemäldegalerie. The exhibition at the Museum für Fotografie draws on the Würth Collection’s extensive holdings, especially of Max Ernst’s graphic works, which are now being shown in Berlin for the first time.
Press release from the Museum für Fotografie
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Above the Clouds Midnight Passes 1920 Photographic enlargement of a collage and ink, facsimile, 2024 73 x 55cm Kunsthaus Zürich Public domain
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) The broken marriage 1925 Photomontage 16.5 x 12.2cm Sammlung Siegert, München Public domain
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) The Stall of the Sphinx 1925 Pencil on paper 16.4 x 15.2cm Sammlung Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Little Tables around the Earth (Petites tables autour de la terre) 1926 From Natural History (Histoire naturelle) Collotype of a frottage 50 x 32.5 cm (sheet) Paris: Éditions Jeanne Bucher Portfolio with 34 collotypes of frottages 51.7 x 35 x 1cm
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Cactus 1929 Silver gelatin paper 12.4 x 17.3cm
“The object, which, in its surroundings, is never seen other than in its most mundane aspect, is given new life when isolated in the lens of the viewfinder. […] It seemed to me that the clarity of a constructed form, when removed from its overly distracting surroundings, could be depicted convincingly through the use of photography.”
~ Aenne Biermann
Max Ernst (1891–1976) Quiétude from The Hundred-Headless Woman 1929 Collage novel with 147 reproductions of collages Paris: Éditions du Carrefour 25 x 19cm
The Hundred Headless Woman is Ernst’s first collage novel. It features a loosely narrative sequence of uncanny Surrealist collages, made by cutting up and reassembling nineteenth-century illustrations, accompanied by Ernst’s equally strange captions. Ernst’s French title, La Femme 100 têtes, is a double entendre; when read aloud it can be understood as either “the hundred-headed woman” or “the headless woman.” Along with this enigmatic title character, the book marks the introduction of Ernst’s favourite alter ego, Loplop, “the Bird Superior.” Ernst was deeply engaged with illustrated books during the 1930s; in addition to collage novels, he created many etchings and lithographs to complement the poems and stories of Surrealist writers with whom he was closely associated.
Gallery label from Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018 on the MoMA website Nd [online] Cited 31/03/2025
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Loplop presents the members of the Surrealist group 1931 Reproduction of a collage in Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, No. 4 27.4 x 19.9cm
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) / Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) Aveux non avenus / Disavowals (frontispiece) 1930 Paris: Éditions du Carrefour Book with 11 heliogravures of collages 22 x 17 x 2.8cm Sammlung Siegert, München
Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1910-1985) The Battle of the Penthesilea II 1937 Photomontage, silver gelatin paper 18 x 24.2cm Sammlung Siegert, München
Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of the most important representatives of Dadaism and Surrealism, two artistic movements that turned traditional norms on their head from the 1920s onwards. His boundary-crossing works combine dream and reality. His art also was created at a time characterized by a new, creative approach to photography. Snapshots, scientific photographs and images of war machinery inspired him and served as working materials, especially for his collages. Although he never used a camera for his art himself, technical and artistic developments in the medium of photography significantly influenced his work. Last but not least, Max Ernst liked to pose for the camera, whether for images taken by well-known photographers or made in photo booths.
Some 270 works will be exhibited, primarily works on paper but also paintings by Max Ernst and photographs, photograms, collages, and illustrated books by his Surrealist contemporaries. Although these artists were explicitly not dealing with mundane reality but instead with what lies beneath, behind and in-between, the still relatively new medium of photography was of great importance for many. Last but not least, they also used it to make visible what remains hidden to the naked eye without technical means: the distant, the tiny, the moving.
Max Ernst’s works are framed within the context of both contemporary and historical references. There are numerous and surprising parallels to photographs by other artists. Semi-automatic methods, working with found objects, unusual combinations, and the blurring of traces have equally shaped the work of Max Ernst and the photographic oeuvres of many of his contemporaries and other artists that followed. Even a century after André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto on 15 October 1924, they have not lost any of their fascination.
Gazes and Visions
The Motif of the Eye as a Surrealist Symbol
For the Surrealists, free, wild seeing opened up perspectives on an untamed world beyond reality – provided that the eyes were used in the right way or equipped with appropriate devices. Thus the motif of the eye symbolizes the translation of visions into perceptible images. Max Ernst’s frottages show radically enlarged, wide-open eyes hovering over a flat horizon. Visionary seeing can also be assisted by various instruments. In a coloured collage for Les malheurs des immortels, a young man gazes through two pipes, cheeks flushed with excitement: what might he be looking at?
The focus on inner vision becomes the theme of a 1929 collage, in which the portrait photos of the Surrealists, all shown with eyes closed, are arranged around the reproduction of a nude painting by René Magritte. In so doing, a very masculinely connoted group activity is simulated in which sexual desire makes possible the liberation of thought. A violent variation – a blinding, likewise understood as liberation – appears in the famous eyeball-slicing scene in the prologue of the 1928 film Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
Flora, fauna, firmament
Frottage, Nature Printing, and Plant Photography
Plantlike animals, seashell flowers, fishbone forests, crocheted stars – the visual world of Max Ernst is full of fantastic forms. For him, nature served as both inspiration and material. In his frottages, he used wood, leaves and much more for rubbings on paper. This is how the portfolio Histoire naturelle (Natural History) was created in 1926. The frottages were reproduced as collotype prints, photomechanically produced prints using an exposed glass plate as a printing block.
With Histoire Naturelle, Max Ernst drew on natural history encyclopaedias, but reworked the originals to create his own natural history. In so doing he dissected nature, showed the tiny and the distant, and created planar structures rather than views. This interest in the formal language of nature also resonates in the photography of the New Objectivity from around the same time, which reveal the aesthetic power of natural forms. That also made them interesting to the Surrealist movement.
In his artist’s book Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy from 1964, Max Ernst devoted himself entirely to celestial phenomena. As in photograms, Ernst used objects here like spirals or gears as stencils to evoke comets and nebulas.
Between Positive and Negative
Photogram, Cliché Verre, and Other Darkroom Experiments
The play of positive and negative effects is a recurring theme in Max Ernst’s oeuvre. Early works created using fine lines incised on a black ground show motifs that appear fragile and vague. He also used photographic techniques for some of his works and transformed his frottages into negative forms in Man Ray’s studio. In 1931, for example, he created dark photograms as illustrations for René Crevel’s text Mr. Knife, Miss Fork.
Max Ernst’s use of manually produced prototypes relates to a technique borrowed from the early days of photography: cliché verre, or glass printing. In this hybrid process, an etching is created on a glass plate coated with paint or ink, which then serves as a negative for the print. The twentieth century witnessed a rediscovery of cliché verre and the further amalgamation of photographic and drawing processes. The growing interest in camera-less photography led to a wide range of experiments using light and unconventional materials in various avant-garde circles.
Invisible Cuts
(Photo-) Collages, Collage Novels, and Surrealist Photography
For Max Ernst, collage is the fundamental mode of artistic production. It encompasses a colorful variety of methods for combining materials of all kinds, initiating an open-ended artistic process. Max Ernst had already experimented with collages of printed photographs during his Dada years. The combination of the most diverse illustrations and their fusion into a new image by painting and drawing over them all took place within the working process.
For his wood engraving collages, Max Ernst made use of old-fashioned illustrations from popular scientific magazines of the nineteenth century. Many of these images were also based on photographs; at that time, however, photos could not yet be reproduced and thus had to be rendered as wood engravings. His three collage novels featured visions and hallucinations alongside blasphemy, the critique of bourgeois morals, and the glorification of free love and revolution.
Photographers of the Surrealist movement from Claude Cahun to Karel Teige, from Georges Hugnet to Emila Medková created with the help of camera and darkroom as well as scissors and glue, a rich and multifarious cosmos of idiosyncratic realities that radically transcended traditional aesthetics.
Max Ernst in Front of the Camera
From Studio Portrait to Photo Booth
Max Ernst is one of the most frequently photographed artists of the twentieth century. He posed for the cameras of important photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Arnold Newman, Lee Miller, Irving Penn, and Man Ray. Their portraits demonstrate just how individual the view of a person can be. A whole series of photographs shows the artist at work, with his art, or in the studio. Whether in focused concentration wearing his painter’s smock, in the midst of creative chaos, or in intimate relation to his sculptures – such photographs reinforce or even create the iconic conception of the artist.
Another group of images shows Max Ernst with female companions such as the artists Leonora Carrington or Dorothea Tanning, which convey the intensity of their relations. As a member of the Surrealists Max Ernst frequently appears in group portraits. These images bear witness to the various stations of the movement – its beginnings in Paris or exile in America – as well as to constellations of fashion and gender. Whether individually or in a group, pensive, playful, joyful or serious, the photographs tell of Max Ernst’s delight in self-representation and in theatrical play.
Text from the Museum für Fotografie
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Max Ernst, New York 1941 Silver gelatin paper, new print 25.1 x 20.1cm
Josef Breitenbach (German, 1896-1984) Max Ernst and the seahorse, New York 1942 Silver gelatin paper 24 x 19cm
Arnold Newman (American, 1918-2006) Max Ernst, New York 1942 Silver gelatin paper 24.2 x 18.6cm
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Max Ernst 1946 Gelatin silver print
A reproduction of this image on postcard for the Max Ernst retrospective: 30 Years of his Work – A Survey, Copley Galleries, Beverly Hills 1949 is included in the exhibition.
John Kasnetzis Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with the sculpture Capricorne, Arizona 1948 Silver gelatin print, later print 23.6 x 18.8cm
In the summer of 1947, Max Ernst, exuberant and inspired by the arrival of water piped to our house (up to then we had hauled it daily from a well 5 miles away), began playing with cement and scrap iron with assists from box tops, eggshells, car springs, milk cartons and other detritus, The result: Capricorn, a monumental sculpture of regal but benign deities that consecrated our “garden” and watched over its inhabitants. Years later, when we had gone, a sculptor friend made molds and sent them to their creator in Huismes, France where he reassembled his Capricorn for casting in bronze. The above photo is a one-shot, spur-of-the-moment caper made after taking a people-less documentary photo.
Dorothea Tanning from Birthday, Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986
Denise Colomb (French, 1902-2004) Max Ernst on the roof terrace on the Quai Saint-Michel in Paris 1953 Silver gelatin paper, later print 28 x 22cm
Fritz Kempe (German, 1909-1988) Max Ernst, Hamburg 1964 Silver gelatin print 12.8 x 17.7cm
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Seen at the Neuilly fair 1971 Colour reproduction of a collage, sheet 3 from the portfolio: Commonplaces. Eleven Poems and Twelve Collages 49 x 34.5cm
Museum für Fotografie Jebensstraße 2, 10623 Berlin
Apparently, “the exhibition presents photography by one of Germany’s most important artists.”
Until recently I had never heard of this artist and I have been studying photography for over 35 years.
Allegedly, “many of Klemm’s photographs have become “icons of contemporary history” and have shaped the cultural memory of several generations.”
What does that even mean – “icons of contemporary history” – it’s just art speak that means absolutely nothing!
If we actually look at the work there are some really strong photographs here that form a cohesive body of work which interrogates the reality of a country that was divided for decades, which examine the postwar formation of German culture and identity.
“[The exhibition] includes pictures from every sphere of society: from politics, culture and the economy, photos that capture unique and often tense moments as well as plain everyday life, photos of demonstrations, protests, and of immigrants, of cultural events, mass gatherings, and urban spaces.” (Text from ifa website)
While Klemm’s photographs combine the documentary and the artistic in German press photography, her artistic voice is not a lone voice in the wilderness documenting Germany before and after reunification. Variously (but not exclusively) we have from the 1930s onwards and reaching its social reality apotheosis in the 1970s-1980s artists such as Friedrich Seidenstücker, Benjamin Katz, Chargesheimer, Michael Schmidt, Helga Paris, Günter Zint, Wendelin Bottländer, Andreas Horlitz, Christa Mayer, Sibylle Bergemann, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Struth, Wilhelm Schürmann, Volker Döhne, Elfriede Mejchar, Hildegard Heise, and Timm Rautert.
At their best Klemm’s photographs are essential – (in the sense ‘in the highest degree’): from late Latin essentialis, from Latin essentia (see essence) – which is, the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something … which determines its character. That is what Klemm so vibrantly and insightfully captures, the true essence of an event which is then marked down in history. “Her sure sense of the true essence of an event allows her to capture moments that tell stories far beyond what the pictures seem to show at first glance.” In the highest degree, Klemm’s photographs “offer an insight into the most significant aspects of social life in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR”
But she is not alone in this endeavour and to argue that her photographs are “icons of history” and that she is one of Germany’s most important artists is pure hokum. Why curators and/or media people continue to write this stuff is beyond me…
Just let the artist tell her stories and the photographs will speak for themselves.
Strength, insight, essence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition presents photography by one of Germany’s most important artists. Barbara Klemm’s work, spanning forty years, bears witness to the historical development and present-day reality of a country that was divided for decades. Many of her pictures have become icons of contemporary history, shaping the cultural memory of several generations.
An exhibition by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. ifa is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg, and the city of Stuttgart.
Barbara Klemm’s works bear witness to the historical development and present-day reality of a country that was divided for decades. Many of her pictures have become icons of contemporary history, shaping the cultural memory of several generations. It is a body of photographic work that blends documentation and artistic inspiration in a way that is rarely encountered in the German press.
With the exhibition Barbara Klemm: Light and Dark. Photographs from Germany, the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents photographs by one of Germany’s leading photographers. At GfZK, they will be shown in Germany for the first time in 15 years
Most of the photographs shown in the exhibition were taken for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Starting in 1959, Barbara Klemm began her career at this newspaper working as a laboratory assistant and in plate production. From 1970, she became an editorial photographer focusing primarily on political and feature photography. However, her photographs are far more than coverage photos taken for the moment. They offer an insight into the most significant aspects of social life in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. A central focus of the exhibition is on photographs taken in East and West Germany before and after reunification. These images portray diverse aspects of social life, including politics, culture, and business. They depict a wide range of social realities – precarious and everyday situations, demonstrations, protests, migrant life, as well as cultural events, mass gatherings and urban space.
With an unerring instinct for the essence of a situation, the photographer captures moments that reveal far more than what is portrayed on the surface. Her photographs, as Barbara Klemm herself describes, reveal the “distillation of an action” – and, in doing so, the distillation of history itself.
Photography as documentation and artistic inspiration
Many of Klemm’s photographs have become “icons of contemporary history” and have shaped the cultural memory of several generations. It is a photographic work that combines documentation and artistic inspiration in a way rarely found in the German press. Barbara Klemm adds her own perspective to the supposedly objective documentary and follows the design rules of art in her image compositions.
Although these photographs were mostly commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – for which Barbara Klemm worked from 1959 as a laboratory assistant and in cliché production, and from 1970 as an editorial photographer specialising in politics and the arts section – they are far more than reportage images made for the day.
Social insights from East and West Germany before and after reunification
The images show the most important areas of social life in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. A clear focus of the exhibition is on photographs taken in East and West Germany before and after reunification. There are pictures from all areas of social life – from politics, culture and the economy – of precarious and everyday situations of social reality, of demonstrations, protests and the lives of immigrants as well as of cultural events, mass events and urban spaces.
About the exhibition
Many of her pictures have become “icons of contemporary history”, shaping the cultural memory of several generations. She has created a body of photographs which combine the documentary and the artistic in a manner seldom encountered in German press photography. She adds her own perspective to the documentary genre, following artistic principles of composition. Although the majority of these photos were commissioned for the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung they represent far more than coverage of the day’s events. Barbara Klemm first joined the newspaper in 1959, working in the photo lab and producing photographic plates, before becoming a photographer on the editorial board for art, culture and politics in 1970. Her commissioned work for the newspaper took her to many of the most important events and places in the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and in numerous other countries. Photos of East and West Germany before and after unification are clearly the focus of this exhibition. It includes pictures from every sphere of society: from politics, culture and the economy, photos that capture unique and often tense moments as well as plain everyday life, photos of demonstrations, protests, and of immigrants, of cultural events, mass gatherings, and urban spaces. And again and again, Barbara Klemm portrays people in those rare moments of being that make life so special.
Barbara Klemm’s photographs stand for concrete social reality. Her sure sense of the true essence of an event allows her to capture moments that tell stories far beyond what the pictures seem to show at first glance. These photos are “action in condensed form”, as Klemm puts it, and thus also a condensed image of history. Her photos of the fall of the Berlin Wall are a dramatic climax to her own narrative of history, and in retrospect, her earlier photos from both sides of the Wall seem to be tracing the two Germanies on their path towards reunification, while her later photos closely observe the consequences of the new order.
Text from ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen website
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Lichtnelke Before 1932 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs have been associated with Modernism, Surrealism and New Objectivity / New Vision.
“Hailed as a master for discovering a hitherto ‘unknown universe’ and for his exemplary technical feats as a photographer Blossfeldt’s work is, nevertheless, decidedly subjective as author Hanako Murata notes in her excellent essay on the artist Material Forms in Nature: The Photographs of Karl Blossfeldt(2014). “Not only did he carefully select, arrange, and in some cases physically modify his specimens, but his meticulous attention to detail and image refinement continued throughout each step of production, beginning with his negatives.” Blossfeldt uses the logic of the plant and the logic of his mind to achieve his final vision. A/symmetry as art form.” (MB 2015)
Love them or hate them there are still few photographs like them in the history of photography. Magnificent photographs.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“In contrast to sketched enlargements, which always contain a subjective element, these images present pure nature, so they are likely to provide inspiring material for students. In many cases, these photographs were made by enlarging small details that students could not easily make out in evening light. This considerably facilitates projects. I probably have more than a thousand of such photographs, from which, however, I can only slowly make prints.” ~ Karl Blossfeldt
This was written by Karl Blossfeldt in a letter dated April 11, 1906, to the administration of the educational institution of the art school where he taught from 1899 to 1930. The original letter is displayed in the current exhibition, along with other documents and publications, in a showcase. The quote provides insight into Blossfeldt’s pedagogical practice and highlights his appreciation for documentary photography and its potential for enlargement.
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung
Installation views of the exhibition Karl Blossfeldt – Photography in the Light of Art at the Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation views of the exhibition Karl Blossfeldt – Photography in the Light of Art at the Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing in the bottom image, Farngewächse (Ferns)
With 271 original prints, the oeuvre of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) is being presented in this scope for the first time in two decades. A consistent photographic oeuvre unfolds impressively, which emerged in the context of art education and was only discovered as an independent artistic approach a few years before Blossfeldt’s death. Today it ranks among the classics of photographic history and is mentioned in the same breath as August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch. In terms of reception, Blossfeldt’s photographs are regarded above all as prototypical of the artistic movements of New Objectivity and New Vision.
The exhibition is based on the holdings of the Berlin University of the Arts, the institution at whose predecessor school Blossfeldt himself trained as a sculptor and where he taught the subject of “modelling from living plants” for three decades from 1899. It was there that he created his plant photographs, which he used as illustrative models to teach his students about the variety of forms and details of the botanical world. The precise observation and artistic realisation of the vegetal forms were to serve as creative inspiration for designs in the field of applied art and architecture. In addition to photographs, Blossfeldt also made bronze casts of plant forms as teaching aids – albeit in much smaller numbers – and used them in class. Exemplary pieces are included in the presentation as well as handwritten letters, which provide insights into school procedures and contain statements on the relationship between natural and artistic forms.
Photography was an elementary means of expression for Karl Blossfeldt, which he used specifically for his own purposes. He photographed the heavily processed plant material in multiple enlargements and against a neutral background of light or dark tones. The photographs are of great formal power and concentration, which, beyond their function as teaching pieces, formulate a pictorial language that departs from the representational and leads to abstraction. In particular, Blossfeldt’s two publications “Urformen der Kunst” (1928) and “Wundergarten der Natur” (1932), which appeared during his lifetime, illustrate his own artistic interest in the photographic image. They impressively show how intensively he researched his subject area and how much he appreciated the aesthetic expressive possibilities of the plant as well as its mysteriously magical aura.
A comprehensive catalog presenting the Berlin Blossfeldt collection will be published by Schirmer / Mosel. The publication and exhibition are based on many years of cooperation with the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung website
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Osmundaceae – Königsfarngewächse (Osmundaceae – Royal fern family) Nd Gelatin silver print 20.0 x 28.4cm Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Adiantum pedatum (Northern maidenhair fern – young rolled up fronds) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Haarfarn (Adiantum pedatum), Junge gerollte Wedel, 20-fach (Hair fern (Adiantum pedatum), young rolled fronds, 20x) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Akelei (Aquilegia chrysantha), Blüte (Columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha), flower) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Ziegelrote Brennwinde (Cajophora lateritia), Frucht, 10-fach (Brick-red morning glory (Cajophora lateritia), fruit, 10-fold) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
The exhibition features 271 original prints by Karl Blossfeldt and 13 corresponding bronzes, created in the context of his teaching at the educational institution of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts in Berlin. They come from a collection of over 600 original photographs from the archive of the Berlin University of the Arts, the predecessor of the named educational institution. Blossfeldt himself was trained as a sculptor there and later taught the subject “Modelling after Living Plants” at the same school. To familiarize his students with the diversity and details of the botanical world, he continuously developed new plant images. He chose his subjects based on his botanical and art historical knowledge, exploring the Berlin surroundings and the local botanical garden. The detailed observation of plant forms and their free artistic interpretation were intended to serve as inspiration for designs in applied arts and architecture.
Photography became an essential means of expression for Karl Blossfeldt, which he used with specifically crafted equipment for his purposes. He photographed the occasionally heavily modified plant material in multiple enlargements against a neutral light or dark background, producing images of great formal strength that vividly demonstrate the diversity of the plant world. Walter Benjamin’s insightful reaction to Blossfeldt’s photographs was correspondingly admiring: “The diversity of forms in nature is infinitely great. Of the approximately two billion people living on earth, there are no two who are completely alike. The same applies to the entire plant and animal world. Everywhere variations, everywhere mutations of a basic type.” (Walter Benjamin: “News from Flowers,” in: Die Literarische Welt, November 23, 1928)
Ultimately, Blossfeldt’s works have asserted themselves as independent artworks beyond their function as teaching aids. They start from the representational and lead to an abstract, typifying visual language that invites many associations. Particularly, the publications “Urformen der Kunst” (Art Forms in Nature), 1928, and “Wundergarten der Natur” (Wonders of Nature), 1932, which appeared during Blossfeldt’s lifetime, show how intensively he had explored his subject matter and how much he appreciated the aesthetic possibilities of plants and their mysteriously magical aura.
A comprehensive catalog presenting the Berlin Blossfeldt collection is published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag (600 pages, 733 colour illustrations, €98, German/English, texts by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Angela Lammert, Norbert Palz, Dietmar Schenk, Claudia Schubert). The publication and exhibition are based on the long-standing cooperation between the Universität der Künste, Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts) and the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne.
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Schönmalve (Abutilon), Samenkapseln, 6-fach (Abutilon, seed capsules, 6-fold) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Traubenholunder (Elderberry) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Osterluzei (Easter Lily) Before 1928 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Bohne (Phaseolus), Keimling (Bean (Phaseolus), seedling) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Ackerschachtelhalm (Equisetum arvense), Sommertrieb (Field horsetail (Equisetum arvense), summer shoot) Before 1926 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Winterschachtelhalm (Winter Horsetail) Before 1927 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln Phone: +49 221/888 95
Opening hours: The ongoing exhibitions are open daily from 2pm to 7pm. With the exception of being closed on Wednesdays.
Exhibition dates: 27th April – 10th November, 2024
Presentation in the Photography Room
Curator: Barbara Engelbach
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) 77. Deutscher Katholikentag, Köln (German Catholic Day) 1956 Gelatin silver paper 29.6 x 39.6cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
A special event in Cologne was the 77th Catholic Day in 1956. It attracted over 800,000 people to the closing rally. Konrad Adenauer gave a speech at the time as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. Chargesheimer does not show the reason for the crowd, but the mass that forms an uncanny formation when it raises its right hand in greeting. In other photographs, the crowd appears to consist of individual people in random constellations.
I was born in 1958. Britain was still recovering from the privations of the Second World War with rationing not ending until mid-1954. Germany was a divided country, West and East, with communism an ever present threat across the border. The Iron Curtain.
Chargesheimer’s objective street photographs picture a Germany which remembers (is embedded in) the horrors of the past even as it strives to create a new future. His images document the immediacy of this world of darkness and light in dystopian and utopian scenes… as though people are dreamt into strange, fractured cities.
In dystopian photographs such as Hinterhof, Cologne (Around 1957, below) and Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne (Before 1958, below), Chargesheimer “captured the mountains of rubble in expressionistic images; the bombed-out ruins of houses radiate a gloomy blackness. Dark backgrounds and harsh contrasts can also be found in his portrait photos.” Illicit, fleeting intimacies and remembrances stain the photographs.
In seemingly mundane utopian photographs, Chargesheimer’s charged eye observes the conflation of the everyday and the absurd: the conformity of suit, tie, dress and handbag in Cologne (Around 1957, below) or the shredded paper being spread by the woman for the celebration of Corpus Christi in Ohne Titel (Konfetti streuendes Mädchen) (c. 1956-1957, below) in an almost empty street, the vanishing point leading off into an interminable, indeterminate distance.
“Chargesheimer takes an interest in people and their lives. This is reflected in the long series of images of individual people and their situations. He photographs a boisterous woman in a top hat in a bar, a couple with a dog in an inn, people decorating the street with flowers and shredded paper for Corpus Christi. Chargesheimer’s careful selection and editing bring the photographs to life. You can immerse yourself in them like in a neo-realist film from the 1950s.” (Text from Museum Ludwig)
Chargesheimer’s documentary visual style (his everyday language of light and life) has a hard cutting edge, sharpened by Germany’s political and social situation – that macrocosmos reduced and intensified in the microcosmic theatre of the street. His photographs alter both spatial and temporal perceptions through their “topographic immediacy… plung[ing] viewers into the nearly real-time plight of believable and flawed protagonists.”1
The drama of the streets. Dark and light. Such is life.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Ara H. Merjian, Rhiannon Noel Welch. “It’s a Neorealist World,” on the Art In America website September 22, 2020 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Durch Straßen wie diese führte mein Schulweg, sieben Jahre lang; viele tausend Male bin ich durch solche Straßen gegangen, aber nie in sie eingedrungen; erst viel später – in der Erinnerung begriff ich, was Straßen wie diese bedeuten, ich begriff es, wie man plötzlich Träume begreift, wenn ich in fremden Städten stundenlang durch Straßen ging und eine wie diese suchte, aber nicht fand.”
“My way to school led through streets like these for seven years; I walked through such streets many thousands of times, but never entered them; only much later – in memory – did I understand what streets like these meant, I understood it in the way one suddenly understands dreams when I walked for hours through streets in strange cities and looked for one like this but did not find it.”
Heinrich Böll Streets Like These (1958) from Unter Krahnenbäumen. Bilder aus einer Straße. Mit einem Text von Heinrich Böll (Unter Krahnenbäumen. Pictures from a street. With a text by Heinrich Böll) (Google Translate of the German)
Intimate moments and the rough Rhineland: under the pseudonym Chargesheimer, Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer became a photography legend in post-war Cologne. The Museum Ludwig celebrates the 100th birthday of the former citizen.
He captured the mountains of rubble in expressionistic images; the bombed-out ruins of houses radiate a gloomy blackness. Dark backgrounds and harsh contrasts can also be found in his portrait photos. For example, on the famous “Spiegel” cover photo from 1956 with a portrait of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which for some was all too diabolical and therefore damaging to the election campaign. Romy Schneider and Jean-Paul Belmondo were later better off.
His early death remains a mystery to this day. Chargesheimer died on New Year’s Eve 1971, probably taking his own life. He was only 47 years old.
Installation views of the exhibition Chargesheimer, Museum Ludwig, Köln 27. 4. – 10.11.2024 showing in the bottom image Chargesheimer’s Große Vitrine (Gebetsmühle) (Large display case (prayer wheel)) Nd Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln/Marc Weber
On May 19, 2024, Cologne photographer Karl Heinz Hargesheimer, who was known as Chargesheimer (1924-1971), would have turned one hundred. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, Museum Ludwig will display a selection of around fifty of his works in the Photography Room. Chargesheimer rose to fame with his photo books Cologne intime and Unter Krahnenbäumen, both of which focus on everyday life in Cologne. The presentation includes forty-three pictures taken within the context of these two series. Two videos allow visitors to access the contents of the photo books. In addition, the presentation includes three of Chargesheimer’s lesser-known sculptures called Meditationsmühlen (Meditation Wheels) and six of his abstract photographic experiments.
In 1957 Chargesheimer’s photographs were published in Cologne intime, a photo book organised by Hans Schmitt-Rost, the then director of the Nachrichtenamt, or news agency, in Cologne. Chargesheimer was tasked with taking representative images of the reconstruction of the city, which had been reduced to ruins in the war, as well as depicting the “typical” residents of Cologne. The photographs contributed by Chargesheimer reflect his unusual, direct view of everyday life. In his 1958 book, Unter Krahnenbäumen, which he organised himself as an independent project, he juxtaposed similar photographs in starkly contrasting series of motifs. This documentation tells the unvarnished truth while affectionately exploring the street in Cologne whose name is featured in the book’s title. Chargesheimer shows life in the streets and in the bars of a lively Cologne neighbourhood that was still intact. German writer Heinrich Böll wrote in the foreword to this publication, “Streets like this one are perhaps the only places where people really live.”
Chargesheimer pursued many interests. Alongside his documentary studies, he investigated photography as an image-producing medium. In the late 1940s, he began experimenting with light graphics and photochemical processes and creating photographs without a camera. Chargesheimer described his experiments with photographic plates and negatives in a text accompanying his first exhibition in Milan in 1950: “Panning, wiping, scraping, cooling, burning – adding acids, bases, colours, and varnishes.” These experiments resulted in painterly works in the style of Art Informel that was prevalent at the time.
In 1967 Chargesheimer began creating kinetic works called Meditationsmühlen (Meditation Wheels) made of Plexiglas. Three of these works from the collection of the Museum Ludwig will be presented in the exhibition for the first time in thirty years. Consisting of multiple levels of crystalline elements made of Plexiglas, the dome-shaped constructions are put into motion through a complex system of gears. The bewildering variety of light reflexes from Plexiglas prisms creates an unusual contrast to the precise mechanics of the gears. Chaos and control seem to complement one another here.
Chargesheimer
On May 19, 2024, the Cologne photographer Chargesheimer (1924-1971), born Karl Heinz Hargesheimer, would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. To mark the occasion, the Museum Ludwig is showing a selection of around fifty of his works. Chargesheimer rose to fame with his photobooks Cologne intime and Unter Krahnenbäumen, which are dedicated to the city of Cologne. In them, he casts a singular and incisive gaze on everyday events. These images convey the artist’s attentive and empathetic approach to photographing the day-to-day lives of people in the various neighbourhoods he documented.
Chargesheimer explored photography’s diverse possibilities. In addition to his documentary work, he utilised photography’s potential as a pictorial medium. In the late 1940s, he began experimenting with light graphics and photochemical processes to produce cameraless photographs. The resulting images are painterly and abstract. From 1967, Chargesheimer also created kinetic sculptures made of Plexiglas, which he called Meditation Wheels.
Press release from Museum Ludwig
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Formlose Mitte (Shapeless Center) 1949 Gelatin silver paper, light graphics 59.6 x 47.7cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Untitled Around 1950 Gelatin silver paper, light graphics, mixed media 59.8 x 49.7cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Ohne Titel (Konfetti streuendes Mädchen) Untitled (girl scattering confetti) c. 1956-1957 Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Fußballplatz (Football field) 1957 From: Im Ruhrgebiet (In the Ruhr area) Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln
Cologne intime, 1957
In the mid-1950s, Chargesheimer photographed different views of Cologne for his photobook Cologne intime. Hans Schmitt-Rost, then head of the municipal news agency in Cologne, had commissioned him to document the successful reconstruction of the city. At the same time, he was to capture images of “typical” local residents. Chargesheimer photographed streets with empty properties cleared of rubble and the prominent new buildings in the city centre. His photographs show crowds of people on the main shopping streets, at the 77th Catholic Convention in Deutz in 1956, and at the Federal Garden Show in 1957. Chargesheimer enlarged details to show particular individuals going about their day. He focused on their distinctiveness, the quality that made them stand out in the crowd.
Hans Schmitt-Rost (1901-1978), who designed the book, uses his evaluative comments to dictate how the photographs should be read. He headed the Cologne City Intelligence Office from 1945 to 1966. In this role, he played a key role in shaping Cologne’s self-portrayal as a city removed from contemporary history, whose actual history is rooted in the Middle Ages. He excluded the Nazi era or relativized it as something foreign to the people of Cologne.
Text from Museum Ludwig
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Schildergasse, Cologne Before 1957 Gelatin silver paper 29.8 x 39.7cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Cologne Before 1957 Gelatin silver paper 29.9 x 39.7cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Hohe Straße, near Große Budengasse, Cologne Before 1957 Gelatin silver paper Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer captured Hohe Straße from a distance. But he wasn’t concerned with the distance to the action, because he highlighted individual people. They stand out in the crowd because they make eye contact with him or speak to him.
The Hohe Straße in Cologne is an important motif for the publication. The filled shop windows and the streams of passers-by represent the economic boom after the currency reform in 1948… The Hohe Straße was already an important shopping street at the end of the 19th century. The Tietz department store, built in 1895, was also famous. Its owner, Alfred Leonhard Tietz, was forced during the Nazi era to sell the department store chain to Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank for well below market value. He was robbed of his assets and had to flee. The department store was renamed Westdeutsche Kaufhof AG and continued to operate under this name after 1945.
Text from Museum Ludwig
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Kirmes Unter Krahnenbäumen Before 1957 Gelatin silver paper 26.3 x 39.8 cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Kirmes Unter Krahnenbäumen Around 1957 Gelatin silver paper 26.3 x 39.8cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Autobahnzubringer im Rechtsrheinischen (Motorway feeder road on the right bank of the Rhine) Around 1957 Gelatin silver paper 39.7 x 29.8cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Hinterhof, Cologne Around 1957 Gelatin silver paper 24.7 x 19.6cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Away from the rebuilt city centre, Chargesheimer photographed intimate neighbourhoods for the photo book Cologne, which were characterised by old buildings, small shops and ruined properties. He also photographed Cologne’s nightlife in bars, workers’ pubs and restaurants with prostitutes without making any judgments.
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Cologne Around 1957 Gelatin silver paper 30.4 x 23.3cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Cologne 1957 Gelatin silver paper 30.4 x 23.3cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne Before 1958 Gelatin silver paper Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Unter Krahnenbäumen, 1958
A year after Cologne intime was published by Greven Verlag, they invited Chargesheimer to realise another photobook. This time, the selection and arrangement of the photographs were placed firmly in his hands. He dedicated the book to the small street of Unter Krahnenbäumen in Cologne. The opening pages present everyday life on the street, documenting people working or chatting with neighbours. These are followed by images of Carnival, which is celebrated on the street and in pubs until late into the night. Pages dedicated to children and the elderly mark a change in theme, while those devoted to the funfair or preparations for the Corpus Christi procession show a mix of generations. On the final pages, photographs of locals dancing and laughing on Unter Krahnenbäumen and inside its pubs reveal the year-round liveliness of the street.
Chargesheimer takes an interest in people and their lives. This is reflected in the long series of images of individual people and their situations. He photographs a boisterous woman in a top hat in a bar, a couple with a dog in an inn, people decorating the street with flowers and shredded paper for Corpus Christi. Chargesheimer’s careful selection and editing bring the photographs to life. You can immerse yourself in them like in a neo-realist film from the 1950s.
Text from Museum Ludwig
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne Before 1958 Gelatin silver paper Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne Before 1958 Gelatin silver paper Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne Around 1958 Gelatin silver paper 24.7 x 21.3cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
The Eigelsteinviertel was a lively and diverse neighbourhood in the 1920s. That changed under National Socialism, when the SA (Storm Division) and later the Gestapo (Secret State Police) persecuted communists. When the Nazis seized power, Jewish residents were expropriated, deported and murdered; Roma families living in Stavenhof, Unter Krahnenbäumen and on Gereonswall were deported to Auschwitz by the Cologne criminal police in the 1940s. After the war, the construction of the Nord-Süd-Fahrt marked a turning point in urban development. In 1957, the master plan for reconstruction came into force, which formed the basis of urban planning until the 1970s. He envisaged a 34-meter-wide lane for the north-south route across the district, which today also cuts through Unter Krahnenbäumen. The street had already been planned in this form during the National Socialist era. Even before the war began, the Nazi city administration had bought up land on both sides of the planned route.
Text from Museum Ludwig
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne Around 1958 Gelatin silver paper 24.8 x 21.3cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne Around 1958 Gelatin silver paper 24.9 x 21.3cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne 1958 Gelatin silver paper 17.9 x 29.8cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Chargesheimer’s work with the unwieldy large format camera Linhof Super Technika meant that he spent a while in each location. He became part of the situation because the residents turned to him and started talking to him. Many of the photos were taken on the Catholic holiday of Corpus Christi. The residents decorated the street with green leaves, house altars and shredded paper for the procession.
Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) Kleine runde Meditationsmühle (Small round meditation mill) 1968 /1969 Acrylic, metal, machine part Diameter: 34cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Wonder noun. a feeling of amazement and admiration, caused by something beautiful, remarkable, or unfamiliar.
As enunciated by Jake Wilson in The Age newspaper in a review of the film La Chimera, “ultimately, the problem dramatised here is the same one faced by any modern artist: how do you retain a meaningful link to your predecessors while shaping something new?”1
Further, my mentor and friend Ian Lobb would often challenge me to define what I was adding to the artistic dialogue of photography instead of repeating the language of a previous era, and I would spar with him asking him was it really necessary to constantly reinvent the wheel, was it not enough to see and feel with clarity and humour those precious moments that surround us, and insightfully photograph them. These are the questions that enliven life: is it always necessary to shape something new, or is it enough to be attentive to the moment – of your mind, heart and vision – to create spellbinding photographs that carry your own interpretation of a certain reality.
Such is the case with the stimulating, two-room exhibition of the German photographer Ulrich Wüst at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne.
Wüst’s photography shows great affinity with the work of Bernd and Hiller Becher and the Becher and Dusseldorf Schools of photography which would have been known in East Germany by the time Wüst shot the 1980s series Stadtbilder. 1979-1985 (Cityscapes. 1979-1985) that first brought Wüst to international attention (the border was very permeable to artistic ideas from the West reaching East Germany).2 Indeed, most of Wüst’s oeuvre has direct links to the aesthetic of the Bechers (with their attention to detail and “devotion to the 1920s German tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity”) and photographers such as Thomas Ruff (with their surreal enlargement of scale and “fundamentally sceptical attitude towards photography’s claim to truth and documentation”).
I believe that referencing and riffing off that aesthetic as Wüst does is no bad thing … for it forms the basis for the photographer’s further take on reality. But there are plenty of other forces at play in his photographs. I observe traces of August Sander, Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, Michael Schmidt and Eugène Atget among others, especially with the latter in the positioning of Wüst’s camera.
As he observes, “When shooting I often find that if I move just fraction away from the more customary perspective a subtle heightening of tension with take place within the image. It’s no accident that I and my camera frequently get suspicious looks when the angle of the lens shifts away from the perspective found in souvenirs and postcards.” (Wall text from the exhibition)
And this is exactly what Atget did, he moved his camera from the “normal” point of view ever so slightly so that there immediately becomes this tension within the image plane coupled to the possibility of a magical revelation of space, an ironic comment on construction, or a grotesque play of opposites. As Wüst says, his vision, his observation, contains “plenty that is comic, grotesque, ironic” which many people do not see.
If we think about the supposedly objective work of the Bechers, which they insisted was all about documenting the object and not about any type of emotion, we fail to consider, as Julia Curl opines, “that this “objectivity” is only surface-level – that the work is deeply personal, even if its apparent uniformity claims otherwise.”3 Personally, I have never bought into the cool objectification of the Becher’s work for the photographers made defined choices as to how they depicted their constructed realities, each iteration of a water tower, gravel plant or cooling tower different from the other (fragments of a whole). This was deeply personal vision of how the world is perceived.
The same can be said of the photographs of Ulrich Wüst. His photographs are entirely personal, fragmentary excavations of history. In Wüst’s works by series, his photographs – surreal, sculptural scenes absent of people, full of elemental beauty – are not just the flawed humanity of our creation / the creation of our flawed humanity … but the creation and imagination of the human mind captured by the eye of the camera. Wüst’s photographs challenge us to look closer at the reality around us not accepting the status quo, the postcard view, not walking the city as if unaware of the vistas around us, feeling the “traces, injuries, missing and empty spaces in the image, so that things begin to speak of themselves…”4
As the art historian Matthias Flügge states, Wüst’s photographs are “images of intellectual-spatial situations,” wholly a creation, an accretion, on existing forms of photography. Not something new, which is ultimately unnecessary, but a growth in “wondering” – not wandering – achieved through the gradual accumulation of additional layers of beauty, feeling, knowledge so that we are informed and fully aware of our (un)familiar surroundings.
The photographs tell a powerful story of Germany before and after the fall of communism whilst instilling in the viewer a wondering, an accumulation and visual nourishment for the senses.
Such is the photography of Ulrich Wüst.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. The only down side to this exhibition is that all the black and white photographs are modern archival ink jet prints. Call me old fashioned but these pigment prints have no real “presence”. It’s like the difference between an LP and a CD, or a movie in Technicolor or 5K. One has “atmosphere”, one has mood and aura and the other just sits there in all its perfection like a dog with a bone waiting for you to go “oooh, ahhh”. There are people that say you can’t tell the difference between the two. Rubbish. Give me gelatin silver prints any day of the week.
1/ Jake Wilson. “Lost and Found while digging up the cinematic past,” in The Age newspaper, 11 April 2024, p. 24.
2/”Huyssen reveals the complexity of artistic development on both sides of the Wall and notes that “the borders between East and West became porous during the 1970s as a result of treaties between the GDR and the FRG.” His focus in this regard, however, is on those artists who left the East for the West and made an impact there, such as Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter; he does not acknowledge the extent to which ideas and influences went in both directions. … While it is true that West German artists showed little interest in exhibiting in the East or in the art that was created there, East German artists tended to be well informed about Western artistic developments…” p. 598
April A. Eisman. “East German Art and the Permeability of the Berlin Wall,” in German Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (October 2015), pp. 597-616. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies Association
Many thankx to the RMIT Gallery and the ifa for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
An exhibition by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart – in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. This project is an official exhibition of PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography.
“Most viewers, unfortunately, are so dreadfully serious when they look at the pictures. I have to “hammer it home” incredibly hard before anyone will allow themselves to laugh. In my works there is simply – perhaps a bit hidden – plenty that is comic, grotesque, ironic.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
“I’m sure I do give those power symbols the aesthetic treatment, otherwise it’s unlikely that I would have any desire or energy to photograph them. But it would also be unfair to say that these objects do not hold their own innate aesthetic fascination. All I can do is try to describe how I am torn between spontaneous fascination and rational rejection, aiming to convey that experience and make it understandable. When shooting I often find that if I move just fraction away from the more customary perspective a subtle heightening of tension with take place within the image. It’s no accident that I and my camera frequently get suspicious looks when the angle of the lens shifts away from the perspective found in souvenirs and postcards. People are very attuned to that sort of shift.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Flatland. Schönhof, 2013 (centre), The Pomp of Power, 1983-1990 (left) and Red October, 2018 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work captures his wanderings through German history, portraying the social and urban transformations from the GDR and its disintegration, through the German reunification to the present day. Wüst revives the German history in a new static way, where the past and present clash in a dynamic and ever-changing environment.
Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst shows a selection of nine suites taken between 1978 and 2019. Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work can be contemplated from different perspectives. While the observations captured here are rooted in Germany’s division and its mending, at the same time they always relate to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. The seemingly terse images, extremely precise in their composition, are the fruits of lengthy visual wanderings through present sites of recent history.
Ulrich Wüst’s photographic œuvre, which explores Eastern Germany in the broader sense, is not confined to the sunken GDR. It might be described as a pictorial archaeology of our present day. These pictures reveal the finds from his “excavations” and are at the same time tools of their conservation. Wüst has an infallible feel for the graphic quality of everyday situations, objects and materials, but also for the deeper layers of significance associated with found images. Examples are the enlarged details from East German press products that demonstrate a manipulative use of photography.
Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work can be contemplated from different perspectives. While the observations captured here are essentially rooted in Germany’s division and its mending, at the same time they always relate to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. The seemingly terse images, extremely precise in their composition, are the fruits of lengthy visual wanderings through present sites of recent history.
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Flatland. Schönhof, 2013, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
“These photographs of newspapers and magazines were taken in the countryside, things that I found within a very small radius. Previously I had always done that urban stuff but then I would go looking for contrasts, because after a while your eye becomes tired.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Cityscapes 1979-1985 (left) and Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege 1991-1992 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Ulrich Wüst’s photos are “images of mental-spatial situations”
In every city there are places that have been photographed thousands of times. From tourists, amateurs and professionals. Always captured on paper or the digital matrix. Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, Alexanderplatz in the heart of Berlin. Thousands, even millions of looks at the striking symbols of a metropolis that want to capture the essence of the city. Ulrich Wüst was far away from such direct concepts. His view of Alexanderplatz is almost shy, more of a cautious approach, and yet he gets a grip on the place. But it’s not primarily about Berlin. Wüst’s city images are less studies of specific cities than “images of intellectual-spatial situations,” as the art historian and rector of the Dresden University of Fine Arts Matthias Flügge states in his insightful text for the photo book Ulrich Wüst – Stadtbilder 1979-1985 (Ulrich Wüst – City Images 1979-1985).
If you read Flügge’s text, it becomes clear once again that a picture is not just a picture and that it requires more than a fleeting observation, especially with a subject like the cityscape. Because you could easily come to the conclusion that you immediately understand the motif at hand, after all, you yourself are a city dweller and are aware of your habitat. But a photograph is also a starting point for deeper reflections. Wüst’s photographs of prefabricated buildings in East Berlin, vacancies in Magdeburg, and the central square in Karl-Marx-Stadt are not unseen motifs. Rather, they are all too well known. Such urban constellations should not be foreign to anyone who lived in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s, or even those born later or socialised in the West. …
“Determining the status quo of the constructed, shaped, printed or otherwise produced objective world with all its traces, injuries, missing and empty spaces in the image, so that things begin to speak of themselves,” is what Wüst does, writes Flügge.
“For me it had always been about the built environment. […] And then I started on those rather dry Cityscapes, which always seems so objective, even though they never were and never tried to be. I wanted to take a concentrated, analytical look at the city. Back then I had a strong sense of mission; I really did want to achieve something. And the things I wanted to say about the city as space I also wanted to tell people who weren’t at all interested in photography or urban space. In some respects it was definitely intended to enlighten. Ultimately I wanted to provoke a debate about what we imagine a “city” to be and what this environment does to us.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Axel Hütte (German, b. 1951) James Hammett House
1982-1984
Silver gelatin print on baryte paper
66 x 80cm
Loan of the artist
The work of Ulrich Wüst might best be described as a pictorial archaeology of recent German history. With an unsentimental precision these photographic ‘excavations’ pivot around moments of social change; those points in history when the old and the new collide, when the seemingly endless cycle of destruction and construction can so easily relegate the present to the oblivion of the past.
Initially photographing life in the former East Germany, Wüst’s oeuvre grew to include the documentation of everyday situations, objects and materials; expanding further with the addition of found images, cropped and rephotographed by Wüst to reveal alternative readings.
In his sparse black and white Cityscapes, the 1980s series that first brought Wust to international attention, we find images of East German cities and towns still carrying scars from the Second World War – an environment formed through the combination of unchecked decay and Soviet-era reconstruction. With an interest in the absurd – those visual anomalies that arrive through accident or misguided intent – Wüst has forged a unique, non-ideological representation of that time. In a similar manner but on a different scale, Wüst’s Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege (1991-1992) – a photo inventory of objects left behind by the former owner of his house – engages us with the incidental nature of history. Intimate and fragile, these ordinary objects are made monumental through Wüst’s lens, yet these discarded possessions have the same precariousness as the hastily built architecture of cities in perpetual change.
Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work exists as a registry of everyday images. It could be considered akin to the personal archive of a once divided country mending itself, wandering through time, settling upon moments and fragments that also speak to the wider, universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Cityscapes, 1979-1985 (right), Morgenstraße. Magdeburg, 1998-2000 (second right), Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (third right) and Red October, 2018 (left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Morgenstraße. Magdeburg, 1998-2000 (right), Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (centre left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
“As soon as we see people in pictures, we focus on those people. We seem to be fixated on that somehow and we stare at the figures depicted, however small they may be. But as I wanted to steer attention to the built environment, to what we have built for ourselves, I quite simply decided to leave the people out. If there a no people in sight in the pictures, then for one thing nobody can look at them and for another the effect is disconcerting. Disconcertion is a good opening gambit.”
“I make a point of calling myself a photographer, because then the art question usually no longer arises. But if others still want to see me as an artist, I can (happily) live with that. Personally I don’t want to think about that question. The only thing I do want to stress is that my work is not documentary. I use documentary technique as a form, as a means, and in certain works I am also looking for documentary precision.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Cityscapes, 1979-1985 (left) and Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (left) and Notations 1984-1986 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
“While I was still busy fine-tuning my technical skills for Cityscapes, over in West Germany very small automatic rangefinders were coming onto the market. That was in the early 1980s. […] I got hold of one of those and suddenly I could carry a camera with me all the time, take it anywhere, and I started using it like an “extended eye”. The little camera allowed me to take more intimate, more “personal” works. For me that meant talking about my own life. That was the beginning of the series Notations, as I later called it. I focused on my circle of friends and my immediate environment. And so the Notations came about and that was what I wanted to achieve, as a conscious antithesis to other series like the Cityscapes.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Red October 2018, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
“Photographers love to complain about the chaos they work in and how that prevents them from keeping tabs on what they do. At some point I realised that the concertinas were a fantastic tool for tracing and recoding the progress of my work. Above all, they enabled me to locate my negatives, because I used very simple but precise captions with the place and date of the picture. I always liked the versatility of the concertina. Now, whenever I need to find a negative, I take one of these booklets of the shelf and look for the photograph. They have become a means to communicate with myself about my work and I miss them when they are being exhibition and I haven’t got them at home.”
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, The Pomp of Power. 1983-1990, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo by Christian Capurro
It may also have been his professional disposition that led him to pay particular attention to the GDR city. After all, he was an expert. Wüst was an expert in the field of urban development; he knew exactly what he was photographing. In the midst of the “leaden times” of the GDR, an era shortly before the collapse in which hardly anything seemed to be moving. Mid-1970s to mid-1980s. Urban and housing construction has long since said goodbye to the promising ideals of a better, because socialist, promise. The reality was pragmatic and merciless. Dilapidated old building and decaying substance on one side and serial prefabricated building on the other.
Wüst’s pictures, which sometimes develop a peculiar irony in their clarity and compositional elegance, can also be understood as political statements. “They searched for clues in a way that was unusual in the GDR as a way of ascertaining the real perceived state of the present,” writes Flügge about the photographer, who knew exactly what he wanted to find and capture. Even the depiction of reality could be considered subversive in the workers’ and farmers’ state. It wasn’t appropriate to show things as they were. Rather, you should show things as they should be. …
By “limiting the image section, he forces reality to formulate its own,” summarizes Flügge.
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark, 2014-2019 from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Book of the Years. 1978-2008 (right) and Mitte. Berlin, 1994-1997 (left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
The different historical eras come together in his pictures. Relics from the pre-war period, often ruins, alongside the proud examples of Eastern Modernism from the post-war period, and finally the cheap and quickly built architecture of the present day. These photos are still important today, and not just for architectural historians and photography connoisseurs. Wüst’s pictures of the GDR city are visual findings about the condition of its residents, even if the people in them are absent. In his text, Flügge quotes from Alexander Mitscherlich’s book Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte. Anstiftung zum Unfrieden (The inhospitability of our cities. Incitement to Discord), in which the doctor, psychoanalyst and writer examined the West German city as early as 1965: “This city shape is regressively shaping the character of its residents.” In his book, Mitscherlich hoped that the city would one day become a “biotope for free people”. It didn’t quite turn out that way, but in a certain sense Mitscherlich wasn’t entirely wrong either. The GDR would soon disappear and with it the GDR city.
I am well aware of how ambivalent photography is. And just because photographs have a documentary air about them, I find it to some extent dubious to slap a documentary label on them. If, ten centimetres from the edge of my picture, the whole content is counteracted by something completely different, then I can no longer claim to be doing serious documentary work. Documentation as a form, in my view, is just a way to explore a theme – a means. I only want to photograph and not distort things. It’s true that there is a documentary background, but what I do with it is always something of my own and totally subjective.
Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Mitte. Berlin 1994-1997 (right) and Prenzlau, 2018 (left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Prenzlau, 2018, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (right) and Book of the Years. 1978-2008 (left), from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
A collection/compilation. A great deal of chance and responding to mood. The urban excursions, by contrast, followed a strict pattern. There it was about the grey cityscapes, grey “Mitte” and grey “Morgenstraße”. And yet all of them were taken in bright sunlight! Without the weather forecast promising a safe sunny day, I would probably never have been brave enough to set out on wanderings that did not augur much solace.
Most of the pictures in the book of the Years, on the other hand, really were taken in grey weather. They were done over a period of thirty years, mostly without any particular intention, straight from the experience. Later I gathered them into a kind of melancholy section through times and places. The pictures say: I was here. And I was in this or that mood. They are mood! And sometimes they flirt with the mood as well. That can happen.
~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Mitte. Berlin 1994-1997 (right), Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark, 2014-2019 (left) and Prentzlow. Prenzlau, 2018 (centre) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work captures his wanderings through German history, portraying the social and urban transformations from the GDR and its disintegration, through the German reunification to the present day. Wüst revives the German history in a new static way, where the past and present clash in a dynamic and ever-changing environment.
Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst shows a selection of nine suites taken between 1978 and 2019. Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work can be contemplated from different perspectives. While the observations captured here are rooted in Germany’s division and its mending, at the same time they always relate to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. The seemingly terse images, extremely precise in their composition, are the fruits of lengthy visual wanderings through present sites of recent history.
An exhibition by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart – in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. This project is an official exhibition of PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography.
Text from the RMIT Gallery website
Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (left) and Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark, 2014-2019 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024 Photo: Christian Capurro
“In the last few years I started taking pictures in the countryside again. The idea was to have photographs of villages and landscapes that were just as “dry” as my cityscape series, like Berlin, or Magdeburg. The resulting work is far removed from any sort of rural idyll, but equally as far removed from the affection I have from these landscapes. I chose not to give too much away.”
Exhibition dates: 7th October, 2022 – 21st May, 2023
Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt
Wer’e here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere.
Despite years of persecution, death and inequality, the presence of queer identity, diversity and creativity remains undimmed.
There are some fabulous, groundbreaking human beings who are “being seen” in this posting. Equally, there are some fabulous art works that illuminate the(ir) human condition.
Let’s celebrate their existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
About the exhibition
TO BE SEEN is an exhibition devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism website
“When a right is withheld from you, you must fight and not give in; that is a moral duty.”
Joseph Schedel opened the first meeting of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee of Munich on September 24, 1902
Exterior view of the NS Documentation Center in Munich showing a work in the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 – Maximiliane Baumgartner’s “You look at us – we look at you”: Rubbing against the architecture of the executive gaze (Based on a paper by Anita Augspurg ‘Mißgriffe der Polizei’ / ‘Abuses by the Police’, 1902) 2021 Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
TO BE SEEN | Trailer
The exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 is dedicated to the stories of LGBTIQ* in Germany in the first half of the 20th century from October 7th, 2022 to May 21st, 2023 at the Munich Documentation Center. With historical testimonies and artistic positions from then to the present, the exhibition traces queer life plans and networks, freedom and persecution.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at diverse genders, bodies and identities. It shows how queer life became more and more visible in the 1920s and how role models and desires were dealt with more openly. Homosexual, trans* and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance: they organised themselves, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity and conquered their own spaces.
In addition to recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics and society, resistance also increased. After the National Socialists came to power, the LGBTIQ* subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945 their stories and fates were hardly archived or remembered.
Unknown photographer Lili, Paris 1926 From N. Hoyer (ed.). Man into Woman. An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). London: Jarrolds, 1933, 1926, opp. p. 40. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Lili Elbe, a transgender woman who underwent sex reassignment surgery in Berlin in the 1930s.
Around 1900, queer people in Germany began gaining more and more visibility in public life – in art, culture, science, and politics. Existing role models for men and women were being questioned. Homosexual women and men as well as trans* and non-binary people achieved initial successes in their struggle for equal rights and acceptance: they organised and fought for scientific and legal recognition of their sexual and gender identity.
They met in public places, founded clubs and associations, and started magazines. New terms were coined to describe their identities and create a sense of belonging. Urning, lesbian, girlfriend, Bubi, homosexual: more than a hundred years ago there were already many expressions for what we call queer today. But as their visibility grew, so did the social and political backlash. The Nazi takeover in 1933 was a defining moment for queer people – their subculture was largely destroyed. In the postwar years, discrimination continued.
Even decades later, LGBTQI+ history is still hardly remembered or preserved in archives. Through historical testimonies and artistic positions from then and now, TO BE SEEN traces queer lives and networks, the spaces of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+ people, and the persecution they suffered.
Police photo of Liddy Bacroff, taken after an arrest, 1933. Barcoff described themself as a “homosexual transvestite”, lived from sex work, and was convicted several times. In 1943, they was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Liddy Bacroff, a transgender woman initially from Ludwigshafen, who moved to Hamburg and lived for the majority of her life publicly presenting herself as a woman. She did not perceive herself to be a man (and, indeed, in papers she left after having been imprisoned, she determined what her name would be while also conspicuously referring to herself as “Liddy Bacroff, Transvestit”). But this was effectively her own form of self-ID. Certainly the authorities didn’t see her as such — her records remain filed under her deadname and identify her as a homosexual man – and, though she’d have been given a Transvestitenschein in Berlin, she wasn’t IN Berlin. Having not visited Hirschfeld and his Institut, it’s a marvel she uses the term “Transvestit”; elsewhere she does refer to herself as a “Mann-Weib” (a “male woman”), and frequently as a girl or a woman. The authorities, again, call her a man or, occasionally, a “Zwitter.” (NB. “Zwitter” means “hermaphrodite” and is here not meant literally but rather as an epithet recorded in the official files – an insult to her.) So the language that is used to describe trans people is inconsistent and, often, absent (depending on the sources). Reading between the lines is necessary, especially in the official records, which view trans women (regardless their lived circumstances or their appearance) only as homosexual men, and charge them as such. And while Hirschfeld was conscientious, the police were… not. This is especially true as the 1930s unfolded and the country Nazified. I wrote a very long thread a while back about “Heinrich Bode”, who was assigned male at birth but frequently presented as a woman. I used that thread to highlight difficulties of definition because Bode denounced their appearance as a woman in court filings and personal testimony, but at the same time also hinted that there was something much deeper than “just” dressing as a woman. But as they were subjected to prosecution by the Nazified judiciary and security state, they were under duress. So, do we assume that Bode was trans, and denied it because of the threat of punishment? Or was their presentation simply playing with the conventions of gender?
Dr. Bodie A. Ashton Historiker, Universität Erfurt. Text from his Twitter account
The androgynous dancer created new body images and developed the swapping of clothes into a stage genre of its own.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Queer
“Queer” originally referred to anything that did not fit into the usual categories. In English the word queer (meaning strange, other, suspicious), was used earlier as a derogative term for homosexuals. Since the 1990s, however, the term has been adopted by many non heterosexual and non-binary people as a positive self-designation. Within the exhibition, queer is used as a catch-all term for a variety of sexual and gender identities and practices that deviate from heterosexual ideas. The term primarily, but not only, refers to LGBTQI+ – in other words lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersexual persons. Furthermore, “queering” can be understood as a practice of combating various forms of discrimination and exclusion. Applied to gender, sexuality, and identity issues, it means casting a critical gaze at the worldview that regards a heterosexual relationship between two persons as the social norm. The rigid binary division of gender into man and woman and the associated role models are thrown into question. In the exhibition, historical self-designations are used where they can be traced through sources.
Self empowerment
In the German Empire, politics, the economy, and society were dominated by men. The gender order, which was maintained over centuries by state and church, was strictly divided into two parts: men and women were assigned clear roles within which they must operate. People who did not conform to these role models and lived gender and sexual identities outside the normative order were ostracised. They were considered immoral, criminal, or ill. According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code of 1871, sexual acts between men were forbidden and punishable by imprisonment. In Austria, sex between women was also punishable.
But there were individuals who rebelled against the prevailing gender order and fought for a more open society. They opposed the outlawing of homosexuality and transsexuality, advocated a change in criminal law, and assertively engaged in the recognition of their identities. New alliances and self-images emerged. Many of these pioneers paid a high price for their rebellion: they lost their jobs, their families, and their friendships, and were socially isolated.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we present individuals and movements who rebelled against the gender order that prevailed around 1900 and advocated a more open society. In their fight for equal rights and acceptance, they showed solidarity with each other, organised themselves in clubs, founded magazines, coined new terms and met in bars and clubs.
One of them was the chansonnière and cabaret artist Claire Waldoff (1884-1957). Born as Clara Wortmann in Gelsenkirchen, she is a central figure in the Berlin cultural scene of the 1920s. Her songs are known throughout Germany. She lives openly with her partner Olga (Olly) von Roeder and shapes the city’s lesbian scene.
Emil Orlik (21 July 1870 – 28 September 1932) was a painter, etcher and lithographer. He was born in Prague, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived and worked in Prague, Austria and Germany.
Emil Orlik was born the son of a tailor on July 21, 1870, in Prague, then the capital of a province within the Austro-Hungarian empire. He first studied art at the private art school of Heinrich Knirr, where one of his fellow pupils was Paul Klee. Other friends at this time included Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Starting in 1891, Orlik studied at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm Lindenschmit. He later learned engraving from Johann Leonhard Raab and proceeded to experiment with various printmaking processes, including woodcut, which he and his friend, Bernard Pankok, experimented with in 1896.
Orlik left the Academy in 1893. He performed his military service for a year before returning to Prague in 1894. He relocated to Munich in 1896, where he worked for the magazine Jugend (Youth). He spent most of 1898 travelling through Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, and Paris.
Emil Orlik’s prints and techniques went through extensive changes as he traveled internationally, learning new methods wherever he went. Known for his portraits of a wide variety of well-known individuals including Josephine Baker, Albert Einstein, and Marc Chagall, Orlik was an artistic chameleon, never sticking to one genre or style but studying many. His prints catalog his travels, creating a kind of pictorial diary of the years 1892 to 1900 in particular. Many of his works, often produced in color, appeared in the European periodical PAN, along with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Kathe Kollwitz, and Max Klinger.
Japanese art and culture fascinated Orlik. He was aware of the impact Japanese art was having on European art and decided to visit Japan. In 1900, he traveled to Japan and spent a year studying Japanese woodblock cutting and printing. His studies of the Japanese culture led him to the art of Utamaro and Hiroshige. Orlik studied the language before his departure and within four months of his arrival he was proficient enough in Japanese to converse with the artisans whose work he admired and under whom he studied.
Orlik never limited himself to popular subject matter. He studied any scene that inspired him, major events or everyday life. He produced fourteen lithographs of the trial of Arthur Schnitzler and his fellow actors; reenactment of the banned play, “Aus dem Reigin,” for which Orlik was a defence witness. After the trial, Orlik began working for the theatre as a designer of costumes, stage sets, and posters.
He kept all his early woodblocks and, in 1920, he published his celebrated portfolio Kleine Holzschnitte (Small woodcuts) in an edition of 100, which also contained the text of his descriptions of each of the prints. The portfolio contained thirty-four woodcuts, eighteen of which were printed in colours. The complete portfolio is now very rarely found. It included such delightful items as Aus London and the superb colour woodcut Schneiderwerkstatt bei Orlik in Prag (the Orlik tailoring workshop in Prague), which depicts his father and colleague’s busy sewing.
Orlik was also commissioned to design colour posters for the Best-Litovsk Peace Conference at which Russia and Germany ended their conflict. He produced seventy-two lithographs, including a number portraits of Leon Trotsky. Around this time he also began to study photography, and by the mid-1920s was photographing celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Albert Eintstein.
Emil Orlik died of a heart attack on September 28, 1932. His brother Hugo was willed the estate, and with it the numerous works of art Orlik had collected throughout the years. Hugo Orlik and his family perished in WWII at the hands of the Nazis, and the only survivor was an aunt who regained what little was left of Emil’s effects. To this day Orlik’s work is still exhibited throughout the world.
Anonymous. “Emil Orlik Biography” on The Annex Galleries website Nd [Online] Cited 17/04/2023
Installation views of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Bars and clubs, magazines, organisations, private or public places: queer subcultures and networks emerged in Germany beginning at the turn of the century and especially in the 1920s. Political goals were formulated together. People communicated using their own codes, ciphers, and symbols.
The public sphere continued to be reserved primarily for men – heterosexual, white, and Christian men. But the experience of conquering one’s own spaces against all social opposition, of joining forces and stepping into the public sphere together, led to a growing self-confidence in the queer scenes. In the process, they not only fought for their own interests; political bonds were forged and coalitions formed that bridged differences.
Visions for a society with equal rights for all people were drafted, and existing structures of power were questioned. But internal conflicts emerged as well, and not all queer groups pulled together.
§ 175 des Reichsstrafgesetzbuchs
Trancript: “Paragraph 175: Perverse fornication committed between persons of the male sex or by persons with animals is punishable by imprisonment; loss of civil rights may also be imposed.”
According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code, sexual intercourse between men was punishable. This provision originated in the Prussian Criminal Code and was introduced throughout Germany with the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Prior to this, homosexuality was exempt from punishment in some German states, such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, following the example of France. The paragraph was controversial from the beginning: ecclesiastical conservatives and extreme right-wing parties demanded it be made more severe; liberals, social democrats, and communists called for its abolition.
Organisations and the conquest of public space
At the end of the nineteenth century, gay men joined forces to fight against persecution based on Paragraph 175. They founded clubs and associations and sought supporters to achieve their vision of a more open society. Berlin became the hub of this movement and developed into a leading centre of attraction for queer people. It was in Berlin that, in 1897, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded, which aimed to achieve legal and social equality for homosexual and trans* people.
Some activists from the women’s movements joined this struggle, especially when the extension of Paragraph 175 to encompass women was debated in 1909. Their goal was far-reaching sexual and social reform: a woman’s right to sexual self-determination, abortion, extramarital relations, and independence from her husband. Some leading women’s rights activists lived with another woman, but only few openly identified as lesbian.
Queer subcultures flourished in the Weimar Republic. A diverse landscape of organisations emerged that represented the interests of gays, lesbians, and trans* persons. However, the struggle against Paragraph 175 was not always synonymous with advocacy for an open society. Among gay activists there were also those who paid homage to a homoerotic male cult. They excluded – in addition to women – all those who did not conform to their heroic, in some cases also racist ideas of masculinity.
Adolf Brand (publisher) Der Eigene (The Unique) 1926
Founded in 1896 by Adolf Brand, “Der Eigene” was the longest-running homosexual journal. With its literary-artistic contributions it evoked the image of heroic masculinity.
Struggle against Paragraph 175: the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
The physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) came from a liberal Jewish family and began actively campaigning for the abolition of Paragraph 175 at the end of the nineteenth century. His actions were motivated by the persecution to which gay men were subjected. As a sexual reformer and founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he fought against the prevailing rigid sexual morality and contributed significantly to the visibility of queer people.
Magnus Hirschfeld utilised modern means in his educational activities. The silent film drama was shot in 1919 with his active participation. It is considered the first film to deal openly with Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) the subject of homosexuality. Heavily attacked by conservative and right-wing extremists, and by some with anti-Semitic motives, the film was used as an opportunity to curtail the artistic freedom introduced after the 1918 revolution. After being screened publicly for a full year, the film was banned by censors in 1920 and almost all copies were destroyed.
“Anders als die Andern” is about a homosexual musician who is subject to blackmail. When he no longer knows what to do and files charges, not only is the blackmailer convicted, but he himself is also sentenced – for violating Paragraph 175. He is shattered by the verdict and takes his own life.
Excerpts from Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern) (Germany, 1919), which was preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. Funding provided by The Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation and the members of Outfest.
Synopsis
The concert violinist Paul Koerner takes a student under his wing, much to the worry of the boy’s parents. Koerner is meanwhile being blackmailed by a former lover, since in Germany any homosexual relations at that time were punishable under the law, codified in Article 175, which was not removed from the books until the 1960s. The German film, Different From the Others is, as far as we know, the first fiction feature film to address a specifically gay audience. Fortunately, even though more than 90% of all German silent films have disappeared, this film exists today in at least half its original length. When the film was first shown in 1919, gay and lesbian audiences must have been amazed that a mainstream fiction feature film would portray their situation as a fact of nature, rather than a perversion. Today, this film celebrates the brief opening of that door, before it slammed shut for another 50 years.
The film was produced and directed by Richard Oswald, at that time one of Germany’s most prolific independents, who made films cheaply and premiered them in a Berlin cinema he owned, where his wife would often handle the office box. Oswald had earned a fortune in 1917 / 1918 with a number of “educational” feature films about sexually transmitted diseases, which were approved by the censorship authorities, simply because syphilis was rampant in the trenches. Oswald would continue to produce controversial films, like his acknowledged masterpiece, The Captain from Koepenick (1931) based on Carl Zuckmayer’s anti-authoritarian play. The Nazis never forgave Oswald for Anders als die Andern or Koepenick, forcing Oswald into exile and eventually to Hollywood, where he directed several films and televisions shows. Although long under appreciated in Germany, recent critical reappraisals have valued his in-your-face aesthetic and modern subject matter.
Only a severely truncated version of the film has survived, with Ukrainian titles, as Gosfilmofond in Russia. It was restored previously to a semblance of the original 1919 release by the Munich Film Museum. The UCLA restoration is based on that Munich reconstruction, with some changes and additions made.
Credits
Richard-Oswald-Produktion. Screenwriters: Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Cinematographer: Max Fassbender. With: Conrad Veidt, Leo Connard, Ilse von Tasso-Lind, Alexandra Willegh, Ernst Pittschau, Fritz Schulz.
Different From Others: A Legacy Preserved (2012)
Featurette about the restoration of German silent film Different From Others (1919). Produced for the Outfest Legacy Project and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
On October 6 the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 opens at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. TO BE SEEN is devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Participating artists
Katharina Aigner, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Claude Cahun, Zackary Drucker & Marval Rex, Nicholas Grafia, Philipp Gufler, Richard Grune, Lena Rosa Händle, Hannah Höch, Paul Hoecker, Nina Jirsíková, Germaine Krull, Elisar von Kupffer, Zoltán Lesi & Ricardo Portilho, Herbert List, Heinz Loew, Jeanne Mammen, Michaela Melián, Henrik Olesen, Emil Orlik, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Jonathan Penca, Lil Picard, Karol Radziszewski, Alexander Sacharoff, Gertrude Sandmann, Christian Schad, Renée Sintenis, Mikołaj Sobczak, Wolfgang Tillmans and others.
TO BE SEEN will be accompanied by an extensive program of events and outreach on topics such as the persecution of LGBTQI+ persons under National Socialism, the queer history of Munich, intersectionality and drag, as well as queer identity in literature and film. All information and updates can be found at nsdoku.de/tobeseen.
The accompanying publication features a collection of texts and artworks from the exhibition as well as essays by key voices that shed light on past and present queer lives from an academic and social perspective. The book in German and English will be published in December 2022 by Hirmer Verlag. It features contributions by, among others, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Michaela Dudley, Sander L. Gilman, Dagmar Herzog, Ulrike Klöppel, Ben Miller, Cara Schweitzer, Sebastien Tremblay.
TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 takes place under the patronage of Claudia Roth, Minister of State for Culture and Media. The exhibition was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Director: Mirjam Zadoff Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt Project Management: Karolina Kühn, Anna Straetmans, Sebastian Huber
Press release from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
In April 1933, the film “The Mystery of the Gender” ran in Viennese cinemas for about two weeks before it was banned. The film is a mixture of romance and medical educational film, including close-ups of the women’s genitals. Among the protagonists are – without mentioning their names – Toni Ebel, Charlotte Charlaque and Dora Richter. You can find an excerpt of the film in our storytelling http://www.tobeseen.nsdoku.de
Toni Ebel converted to Judaism in early 1933, but reversed the conversion as the pressure of persecution increased. After 1945 she was recognised in the GDR as a victim of fascism. Ebel was able to start a new life as a painter.
Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel remained in correspondence after their forced separation in 1942. In 1946 Charlaque told her friend about her loneliness, her arrival as a refugee in New York and the difficulties in getting her female name recognised.
Dora Richter became known as one of the first trans* women to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Since it was difficult for trans* people to find work, she took a job as a housemaid at the Institute for Sexology, which was looted by National Socialist groups in 1933. Nothing is known of Richter’s fate after 1933.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at rear, an enlargement of an image by an unknown photographer of the Eldorado in the Motzstrasse (1932, below); and at left centre in the display cabinet, an image by an unknown photographer Trans* people in the Eldorado in Berlin (1926, above) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The Eldorado on Lutherstraße was one of the city’s infamous cabaret bars.
The Eldorado was the name of multiple nightclubs and performance venues in Berlin before the Nazi Era and World War II. The name of the cabaret Eldorado has become an integral part of the popular iconography of what has come to be seen as the culture of the period in German history often referred to as the “Weimar Republic”. …
Eldorado was a gay cabaret in that along with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans* patrons, a heterosexual-identifying audience (artists, authors, celebrities, tourists) would have been present as well. “Cross-dressing” was tolerated on the premises, though for the most part legally prohibited and / or sharply regulated in public (and to an extent in private) at the time. This exception to everyday life attracted not only male patrons who wished to dress in the “clothing of the opposite sex”, and their admirers, but also to no small extent women who wished to do the same, and their admirers. Wealthy lookers-on were encouraged to come and drink and watch as so-called “Zechenmacher” (tab payers). The practice was particularly common in so-called “Lesbian bars” or at so-called “Lesbian balls” in the neighbourhood at the time and up the 1960s in places like the Nationalhof at nearby Bülowstraße 37. As women’s incomes were on average much lower than men’s then as now, male spectators with money to spend were explicitly welcome, and it was not uncommon that there were sex-workers present to offer their services. Eldorado also included what have come to be called drag shows as a regular part of the cabaret performances.
The Eldorado, which opened in 1926 on Lutherstrasse in Berlin-Schoeneberg, was – along with its counterpart, the “new Eldorado” on Motzstrasse – one of the internationally most well-known trendy bars of its time. Magnus Hirschfeld, Claire Waldoff, Anita Berber and Marlene Dietrich often and happily visited the Eldorado, as did the prominent National Socialist Ernst Röhm. With its shows, it attracted a wealthy audience, which soon consisted not only of homosexuals and trans* people, but above all of onlookers heterosexuals. Guests could purchase tokens that could be exchanged for a dance with the Eldorado’s “transvestite” staff.
A popular accessory for lesbian women in the 1920s was the “dance monocle”
Short hair, ties, tails, and top hats were other identifying marks within part of the lesbian scene – and soon to be common among modern heterosexual women as well. The “New Woman” of the 1920s broke away from traditional gender images and appropriated new things and spaces that had previously been occupied by men.
In the Berlin scene, but also in other cities, numerous gay and lesbian clubs that rented premises, called for social activities, but also explicitly pursued political and emancipatory goals. One of the largest “women’s clubs” was the Violetta Ladies’ Club, founded in Berlin in 1926.
The founder of the women’s club Violetta was the lesbian activist Lotte Hahm (1890-1967), who also wrote for “The Girlfriend”. Together with her Jewish partner Käthe Fleischmann (1899-1967) she ran the lesbian bar Monokel-Diele in Berlin. After 1933, both initially tried to maintain lesbian networks and meeting places under cover names. Fleischmann, persecuted as a Jew, survived the Nazi era in various hiding places.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
A lively scene for homosexuals and trans* persons emerged in Germany during the 1920s. Especially in major cities, a number of clubhouses, bars, and clubs functioned as meeting places. The undisputed centre of queer life was Berlin. Police authorities there followed a more liberal course than elsewhere after the end of the nineteenth century. Nearly two hundred subcultural venues are documented in the imperial capital between 1919 and 1933, about eighty of them for lesbian women.
In conservative Munich, as in smaller cities and rural areas, fewer venues existed. Homosexual men had to resort to informal meeting places, due to the ongoing criminal persecution. They used public parks and toilets as “pick-up spots” to socialise or have sex. In doing so, they always ran the risk of being denounced or stopped by the police.
Magazines and informal networks
Magazines were an important means of communication for queer subcultures. They listed relevant clubs and bars, bookstores, and associations, and served as contact exchanges. These references and opportunities were essential particularly for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks. However, the publishers had to reckon with the banning of their print products at any time. It was not uncommon for entire print runs or volumes to be labeled as “trash texts” and confiscated.
In order to avoid police persecution and social exclusion, the scene employed its own linguistic codes. Camouflage terms such as “friend”, “girlfriend”, “ideal friendship”, “friendly exchange of ideas”, or “ideal-minded” were used to refer to lesbian and gay connections. Lonely hearts ads in relevant magazines were often the only way to find like-minded people, especially in smaller towns and in the countryside.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing historical magazines
In TO BE SEEN you can leaf through historical magazines. They were an important means of communication for queer subcultures.
Magazines such as “Die Freundsblatt”, “DasFreundschaftsblatt” or “Frauenliebe” referred to relevant pubs, bookstores and associations and served as contact exchanges. Especially for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks, these tips and opportunities were essential. However, the publishers had to expect their printed products to be banned at any time. It is not uncommon for entire editions or volumes to be marked as “trash and dirty writing” and confiscated.
“The Girlfriend” (subtitle “The Ideal Friendship Journal”, later “Weekly Journal for Ideal Female Friendship”) was a magazine for lesbian women from 1924 to 1933 in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is considered the first lesbian magazine and was first published monthly, then every two weeks, and later even weekly.
The editor was Friedrich Radzuweit (1876-1932), chairman of the Federation for Human Rights. The content focuses on information on lesbian life and meeting places for lesbians, political topics, short stories, serialised novels and classifieds. Although “The Girlfriend” was primarily aimed at a lesbian readership, there are also numerous articles that deal with topics such as ‘transvestism’ or transgender. It was discontinued a few weeks after the National Socialists seized power in January 1933: the last issue appeared on March 15, 1933, a week before the Enabling Act was passed.
Covers from Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), September 1932, and Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), 1929
The “Zwischenstufenwand” (sexual transitions wall) in the Institute for Sexology illustrated Hirschfeld’s theory that all people have male and female qualities in them.
The famous picture wall, illustrating Hirschfeld’s sex and gender theories. It was first exhibited in Leipzig (1922) on occasion of the German Natural Scientists’ and Physicians’ centenary and then in Vienna (1930) at the World League for Sexual Reform’s congress. The picture wall (2×1 m by 4×5 m) always had a prominent place in the Institute and was used to explain sexual theories to visitors.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Knowledge, diagnosis, control
Scientific interest in sexuality and gender was expanding around the turn of the century. The amount of sexological research and number of publications increased. Most writings described homosexuality or trans* identities as “pathological” conditions. This assumption has since been scientifically refuted. At the same time, groundbreaking theories emerged, for example Magnus Hirschfeld’s model of “sexual intermediates.” In it, the sexologist anticipated the later realisation that numerous other gender identities besides man and woman exist.
Yet, then as now, knowledge also meant power and control. People were examined, described, classified, and judged as patients. Some sexologists incorporated ideas in their research that drew on biologism and eugenics. These were spread throughout society and later played a central role for the Nazis: their conception of so-called “racial hygiene” distinguished between “valuable” and “unworthy” life.
The driving forces in the German-speaking world from the 1860s on were the lawyer and physician Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Ulrichs in particular fought for the decriminalisation and recognition of homosexuality. His insights into the diversity of sexuality and gender are still essential today. Other scientists understood the “third sex” as a pathological phenomenon and wanted to effect the “re-education” and “healing” of their patients with methods that were sometimes questionable. The result was often physical or psychological trauma.
The Institute for Sexology and its patients
Magnus Hirschfeld was the best-known representative of sexology in the German-speaking world. He combined a pursuit for emancipation and a scientific perspective, was a champion of decriminalisation and a physician at the same time. His Institute for Sexology, founded in Berlin in 1919, became the centre of the liberal-leftist sexual reform movement of the Weimar Republic. In addition to research and medical consulting, the institute operated a library, an archive, and a museum. Unlike conservative sexologists, Hirschfeld and his staff worked towards the self-acceptance of homosexuals and trans* persons.
This “adaptation therapy” or “milieu therapy” aimed to help people adapt to the queer milieu that suited them, instead of repressing their identity. Many important people from the gay community, such as Lili Elbe, were treated here. Homosexual writers such as André Gide and Christopher Isherwood visited the institute. People who today would be considered intersex were also counselled. From the beginning, the Nazis were disturbed by liberal sexology, Hirschfeld, and his institute. Many of the institute’s employees were, like Hirschfeld himself, Jewish. In 1933, Nazi students and SA members demolished the institute; Hirschfeld was on a world tour at the time and remained in exile in France.
The institute grew to become a refuge for “transvestites”. This is how people who we understand today as trans* persons were called at the time. Some of them lived in the institute and earned their living there. They were particularly dependent on it. Despite the institute’s great merits, the relationship between doctors and “patients” was not unproblematic from today’s point of view.
By mediating between queer people and state power, Hirschfeld and his colleagues were able to protect their patients and fight for more rights and freedom for them. But in order to do so, they cooperated with the police and the courts, thus providing the state institutions with access and control. Then as now, intersex and trans* people were rarely perceived as experts on themselves, making them dependent on the recognition bestowed by medicine and the justice system. This was accompanied by a scientific and state-regulatory view of their bodies that pushed them into the role of patients, externally controlled subjects, instead of granting them autonomy over their bodies as well as their own voice.
Hirschfeld’s medical practices are controversial today
However, Magnus Hirschfeld also referred those male homosexuals who, based on his biological research, assumed that homosexuality could also be treated, to other doctors. They castrated the patients and implanted heterosexual testicles in them.
Not only Magnus Hirschfeld’s medical practices, but also his scientific approach is controversial today. His absolute belief in biology leaned towards social Darwinism and eugenics. He founded a “Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics”. He thus promoted “sexual selection” in order to improve the “mental fitness of the offspring”. He was thus at the same time far away and entirely in line with the National Socialists.
The National Socialists saw Hirschfeld as a security risk, a threat to the population growth of the “Aryan race” and not only in him. Tens of thousands of gay men are sentenced to prison, jail, and concentration camps, the gay civil rights movement is crushed, gay hangouts are closed, magazines are banned, and then, on May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sex Research is looted and its library burned.
Session of the “International Conference for Sex Reform on a Sexological Basis”, organised by Hirschfeld 1921 in Berlin at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. (Hirschfeld, leaning forward, is seated just beneath the lectern.) This was the first sexological congress held anywhere, and it laid the groundwork for the Copenhagen congress of 1928.
Titled “Transvestites in Front of the Institute of Sexology” this photograph was taken on the occasion of the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexology in Berlin, 1921.
Willy Römer (December 31 , 1887 in Berlin – October 26, 1979 in West Berlin ) was a press photographer. His picture agency was one of the ten most important of the Weimar period. The pictures mainly illustrate life in Berlin from 1905 to 1935. It is thanks to a rare stroke of luck that his extensive picture archive survived the Second World War almost unscathed.
Starting in 1900, “Transvestite Certificates” were issued by a doctor, that officially certified that a person was known to be “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we also show Gerd Katter’s “Transvestite License”. From 1900, “transvestite certificates” were issued in some cities. It is a medically certified official confirmation that a person is known as “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”. The authorities refrain from making an arrest if you show them during checks. However, those affected are thus registered with the police and can be monitored more easily.
Gerd Katter (1910-1995) came to the Institute for Sexology at the age of 16 – at that time still with a female birth name. Barred from having his breasts amputated because of his youth, Katter tries to operate on himself, which requires an emergency amputation. Katter is one of many people who receive concrete, albeit unconventional, help at the institute. So he is prescribed to visit bars where “transvestites” meet. According to the adaptation therapy pursued at the institute, those seeking advice should be brought into contact with like-minded people. This is how they should learn to accept themselves.
Magnus Hirschfeld repeatedly invited Gerd Katter to the institute to show his guests a medical case study – a practice of displaying people and their bodies that was common at the time, but which is problematic from today’s medical-ethical point of view. Gerd Katter later completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and lived in the GDR.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Female homosexuality and bisexuality received little attention in the male-dominated field of sexology. An exception was the research of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986). The physician situated precisely these topics at the centre of her work. After 1933, left-wing, Jewish, and openly lesbian women in Germany were increasingly targeted by the Nazis. Being Jewish, she emigrated to Paris in 1933, and to London in 1936. Her research on lesbian sexuality and bisexuality earned her international recognition beginning in the 1960s.
Feeling Bodies, Seeing Images
At the same time as the advancements in sexology, new notions of the body, gender, and intimacy were finding expression in art and culture. Literature, theatre, film, and the visual arts offered an opportunity to question gender stereotypes and to create new roles and body images. These served as the basis for imagining freer ways of living and to lay the foundation for what we perceive today as queer aesthetics.
While Article 142 of the Weimar Constitution promised extensive artistic freedom, censorship was simultaneously introduced for the new medium of film. Munich in particular had numerous bans on film and theatre performances deemed offensive.
The bisexual dancer Anita Berber (1899-1928) confronted audiences with homoeroticism, nudity, and drug use, addressing issues that were taboo in the public eye.
The pejorative connotations of decadence as a moral failing or degenerate or degenerative state have often played into the pathologisation and criminalisation of specific bodies and practices. This is especially the case when these bodies and practices come to be seen as a threat to the health and integrity of a nation. Some of the most interesting examples can be found in Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, when the city itself was subject to charges of miasmic contagion. ‘Even the alkaline air around the Prussian capital (Berliner Luft)’, writes performance scholar Mel Gordon in characteristically hyperbolic style, ‘was said to contain a toxic ether that attacked the central nervous system, stimulating long suppressed passions as it animated all the external tics of sexual perversity’.[1]
Dance was regarded as a vector of transmission in spreading this toxic ether. Social dancing (Tanztaumel) swept Berlin in the year following the armistice, offering writers and cultural commentators a rich repository of tropes and metaphors for describing a social, economic and political situation that appeared to be spinning out of control. …
For dance and theater scholar Karl Toepfer, Berber’s aestheticization of her addictions to a plethora of narcotics presented ‘an almost satiric critique of the pretensions to a healthy, modern identity’.[11] Sickness formed the basis of a carefully stage-managed persona in the public eye that was to manifest in equally carefully choreographed routines. For instance, in one of the better-known dances from the Tänze des Lasters series, Kokain (Cocaine, 1922), Berber stages an embattled, spasmodic body torn between a will to live and the delirious effects of a narcotic. One reviewer described the dance as ‘a product of decay’ and a ‘style of degeneracy’,[12] suggesting that her embodiment of Berlin’s ‘toxic ether’ landed with her audiences (ether was also one of Berber’s drugs of choice, particularly once mixed with chloroform and white rose petals). That this piece was set to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874) makes it tempting to position it as the epitome of Berlin’s own ‘dance of death’ in which death and sexuality perform a pas de deux across Berber’s performing body – a body that was to succumb to tuberculosis aged only twenty-nine.
Berber’s dances have been read as ‘jejune’ and derivative;[13] however, this does a disservice to what Susan Laikin Funkenstein describes as ‘a more profound understanding of her contributions’ to modern dance history that were ahead of their time.[14] Although Funkenstein is looking to put some distance between Berber’s perception as a ‘depraved vamp’ and her innovativeness as a dancer, I argue that these are mutually enriching considerations in the development of her decadent choreographies. Berber’s ‘sickness’ as an addict, her perceived corruption as a sexual libertine, and (later) her physical sickness after contracting tuberculosis were not adjacent to her work as a dancer. She danced as she lived – which is to say, decadently – just as her bohemian aestheticism makes it difficult to distinguish where her choreographies begin and end.
In the first half of the twentieth century, artists experimented with new representations of the human body. They conceived of a wide spectrum of possible identities and sexualities situated outside the dominant categories. Artists subverted binary notions of gender, whether through ambiguities, gender-neutral codes, or playing with androgynous body images.
In 1933, the Nazis put an end to this diversity. Avant-garde works by artists such as Hannah Höch or Jeanne Mammen were denounced as “degenerate” and confiscated, banned, or destroyed. The regime instead honoured artists such as Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl, and Josef Thorak, who immortalised traditional gender images in monumental depictions. Such images supported the Nazi regime’s racial ideals, and endured well into the postwar period.
Hannah Höch worked with clichés and role models in her art and was a significant influence on the Dada movement.
Hannah Höch (German: [hœç]; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.
Höch’s work was intended to dismantle the fable and dichotomy that existed in the concept of the “New Woman”: an energetic, professional, and androgynous woman, who is ready to take her place as man’s equal. Her interest in the topic was in how the dichotomy was structured, as well as in who structures social roles.
Other key themes in Höch’s works were androgyny, political discourse, and shifting gender roles. These themes all interacted to create a feminist discourse surrounding Höch’s works, which encouraged the liberation and agency of women during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and continuing through to today.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Lovers
The works gathered here show homosexual couples and their intimate relationship with each other. At a time when gay and lesbian love could almost solely take place in secret, capturing queer intimacy within art became a political statement. The images represent an act of self-assertion within a discriminatory environment. They propose utopias and alternative realities that make togetherness possible – partly with recourse to antiquity, partly with a visionary view of future forms of loving and being.
Gertrude Sandmann (16 November 1893 – 6 January 1981) was a German artist and Holocaust survivor. Born into a wealthy German-Jewish family, Sandmann studied at the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen and had private tutelage from Käthe Kollwitz. In 1935 she was banned from practicing her profession due to the Nuremberg Laws. Given a deportation order in 1942, she ignored it, faked her own suicide, and hid with friends in Berlin until the end of the war. She lived in an apartment in Berlin-Schöneberg until the end of her life. She was a lesbian and, after the war, worked to improve the rights and visibility of LGBT people. Much of her oeuvre is held by the Potsdam Museum.
Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), who trained in Berlin and Munich, took private lessons from Käthe Kollwitz in the 1920s. She and the older artist remained lifelong friends. Unlike Kollwitz, however, Sandmann was less focused on social critique. A committed feminist, women were her favourite theme, as they were for her colleague Jeanne Mammen, who was about the same age.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at centre, Dora Kallmus’ photograph The trapeze artist Barbette (Nd, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The stage as site of utopias
In the Weimar Republic, vaudevilles, theatres, and nightclubs emerged in many major cities, on whose stages a freer treatment of sexuality and gender identities was allowed. Stage celebrities became role models for alternative gender roles, with drag performances developing into a genre in its own right.
The 1920s, often referred to as “golden” years, were by no means characterised by prosperity for most citizens, even though more and more people gained access to entertainment culture. War trauma and economic hardship stimulated the need to escape the worries of everyday life.
For many people, the bars and clubs of this period were places where they came into contact with alternative gender images and homosexuality, as well as where social debates were sparked.
The trapeze artist Barbette (real name Vander Clyde, 1899-1973) celebrated great success in Europe from the mid-1920s. Barbette performed, among other things, in the Berlin Varieté Wintergarten. The sensational productions of the “female impersonators” became increasingly known to a mass audience – and thus also helped the male and female impersonators of the Berlin scene to gain acceptance.
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
Early life
Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career.
She and her sister, Anna, were both “well-educated,” spoke English and French, and played the piano. They had also traveled throughout Europe.
She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.
Career
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. The Karlsbad gallery allowed D’Ora to cater to the “international elite vacationers.” These same clients later convinced her to open her Paris studio.
Between 1917 and 1927, D’Ora’s studio “produced” photographs for Ludwig Zwieback & Bruder, a Viennese department store. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Unknown photographer Dance study of Alexander Sakharoff 1912 Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration: illustr. Monatshefte für moderne Malerei, Plastik, Architektur, Wohnungskunst u. künstlerisches Frauen-Arbeiten – 30.1912
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Life under dictatorship
After the Nazis took power in 1933, every form of queer life was threatened and continued to exist only in private spaces or secret locations. Hopes for a tacit tolerance of homosexuality by the Nazis were finally dashed after the murder of Ernst Röhm, chief of- staff of the SA (Storm Troopers). The period of open persecution had begun.
During the first major Nazi raids against homosexuals on October 20, 1934, 145 men were arrested in Munich alone. Paragraph 175 of the penal code was made more severe in June 1935: any act between men bearing sexual suggestion was now punishable.
About 57,000 homosexual men were sentenced to prison, and between 6,000 and 10,000 of them were deported to concentration camps, of whom at least half were murdered.
Female homosexuality was not prosecuted in the dictatorship, but was socially ostracised. If lesbian women and persons who did not conform to their gender were denounced, they were threatened with police investigations, house searches, and interrogations. If political opposition, social deviance, or racial persecution additionally occurred, they faced repression or even internment in a concentration camp.
The graphic artist Richard Grune (1903-1983) was imprisoned almost continuously from 1934 to 1945 because of his homosexuality. After his liberation from the concentration camp, he processed what he had experienced through art.
“Solidarity,” a lithograph of one prisoner supporting another, by German artist Richard Grune, who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps after being convicted for homosexuality.
Trained as an artist and graphic designer, 29-year-old Richard Grune moved to Berlin the same month that the police began forcing these establishments to shut down. Although prominent nightclubs like the Eldorado faced closure, members of these communities still found ways to continue gathering more privately. For example, Grune hosted two parties for friends in his studio in fall 1934. He was denounced afterward – along with dozens of others – by a private citizen who often passed information to police. Grune was then arrested for alleged violations of Paragraph 175, the statute of the German criminal code that criminalised sexual relations between men. He was imprisoned for several months before being convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.
After serving his sentence, Grune was arrested again by the Gestapo and held indefinitely in what was misleadingly referred to as “protective custody” (“Schutzhaft”) – an experience shared by many convicted of violating Paragraph 175 under the Nazi regime.5 Grune spent the next decade in concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. He escaped from Flossenbürg in April 1945 as American forces approached and camp authorities evacuated the prisoners.
Grune created the featured lithograph6 – “Solidarity: Prisoner Supports His Exhausted Comrade” – in 1945 as part of a series of images inspired by his experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi camp system. These lithographs were reproduced in two published portfolios in 1947.7 Grune’s artwork reflects many of his own experiences, but it does not reference his persecution as a gay man in any specific way. Instead, his lithographs seem to suggest the idea of shared suffering among all concentration camp prisoners. Because sexual relations between men remained criminalised for decades in Germany after the end of World War II, many people convicted under Paragraph 175 chose to conceal the details of their past persecution under the Nazi regime.8
After the war, Grune chose to portray himself as a political prisoner of Nazism, but he was not able to obtain official recognition or compensation for his suffering. Although his lithographs are among the most important artistic representations of concentration camp experiences created immediately after the war, Grune could not support himself as an artist. He did occasionally find design and illustration work, but he made his living by working as a bricklayer. Grune died in obscurity in Kiel, Germany in 1983.
“This is how the Führer cleaned up!” Front page of the extra issue of the Völkischer Beobachter, June 30, 1934, Berlin edition Public domain
Homosexuality in Nazi organisations and in the military
The proscription of homosexuality was used by various sides in the political struggle. In 1931 / 1932, the Social Democrats utilised Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality to harm the Nazi Party. The Röhm case served the notion of “gay Nazis” gathering together in male associations, a phenomenon that did exist. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime increasingly cracked down on homosexual activity in the army, police, and Nazi associations. Intimacy between men was now punished particularly severely in party organisations and the police. Nazi propaganda labeled homosexual men as “enemies of the state” to legitimise this persecution. Nevertheless, clandestine homosexual encounters continued to occur.
Adapting to survive
After the dismantling of gay and lesbian subcultures across the entire state and the harshening of criminal law, homosexual contact took place almost exclusively in private spaces. Fear of denunciation and persecution drove most homosexuals to hide their sexuality and conform.
This also applied to lesbian women and trans* persons, who were not prosecuted per se. They could remain unhampered as long as they did not attract attention. Marriages of convenience were one of many survival strategies. Certain prominent artists were tolerated by the Nazi regime despite their widely known homosexuality. The regime, which needed these stars for its propaganda, held off on persecution, and demanded that they conform in their way of living.
Persecution and imprisonment
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
Part of the diary entry by Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust on the deportation of her Jewish partner Felice Schragenheim to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, August 21, 1944
Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust (1913-2006) and Felice Schragenheim (1922-1945) met in Berlin in 1942, shortly after Schragenheim went into hiding as a Jew. They moved in together a little later and promised to marry in June 1944. On August 21, 1944, Felice Schragenheim was discovered and taken to a Berlin collection point for Jews. Lilly Wust visited her there several times before the deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the hope of being able to help her beloved, Lilly Wust travelled to Theresienstadt herself in the fall of 1944.
Felice was deported to Auschwitz a little later. She died in early 1945, probably in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lilly Wust searched for her for years.
The love story of Lily Wust and Felice Schragenheim gained notoriety in the 1990s through the book “Aimée & Jaguar” and the feature film of the same name. However, there is another version of the story: Elenai Predski-Kramer, a former girlfriend of Felice Schragenheim, tells her perspective on the love story after the book was published and expresses the suspicion that Lilly Wust herself might have betrayed Felice Schragenheim. However, there is no evidence for this.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Only a few homosexual and trans* people succeeded in escaping Nazi persecution through emigration. This option was usually only open to the wealthy or those who had international contacts and could find work abroad thanks to their education and language skills. Leaving Nazi Germany was made more difficult by the measures against capital transfer, which were tightened in 1934. The “Reich Flight Tax” reduced assets by 25 percent upon departure, the export of foreign currency was prohibited, and the transfer of bank or securities assets was made almost impossible.
Individual homosexual or transgender people decided to actively resist the Nazi regime, also in the territories occupied by Germany. They documented the crimes of the Nazi regime, called for resistance, carried out sabotage, committed attacks, or fought as partisans or members of foreign troops against Hitler’s Germany.
Jewish-French author and photographer Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and her partner Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) put up resistance against the Nazi regime.
After four years of subversive activity, the pair were arrested by the Germans in 1944. Initially, the Nazi authorities couldn’t believe that the women carried it out by themselves. “They believed that there must be somebody else involved, there must be a man involved,” says Downie.
While waiting to be questioned, Cahun and Moore attempted suicide. They both took pills – barbiturates – which put them into a coma. Once they were well enough, they were sentenced to death for undermining the German forces. But the Bailiff of Jersey and the French Consul pleaded on their behalf – by that time, the Normandy landings had happened and Saint-Malo (the main connecting port) had been liberated, so they could no longer be deported to camps in Europe – and their sentence was commuted.
Although their lives had been saved, Moore and Cahun were not pleased. “They wanted to be martyrs for their cause,” says Downie. “To them, that would’ve been the realisation of their life of resistance, to be a martyr for freedom.”
At 3.40pm on May 9, 1945, the swastika was lowered from Fort Regent, a 19th-century fortification in St Helier, and the Union Jack was hoisted, signalling the official end of the occupation. Then the celebrations began. Cahun joined the crowds in Royal Square cheering, flag-waving, and holding a sailor aloft. Despite ill health from their time in prison, they kept on creating work after the war. In the same month, a photograph shows them gripping a Nazi eagle badge brazenly between their teeth, a silk scarf tied around their head, their hands dug into their coat pockets, their eyes staring defiantly at the camera.
Queer history was hardly remembered or archived after 1945. To this day, we know only some of the pioneers of the queer emancipation movement. We know even less about the life of those who were persecuted, driven into exile, murdered – or simply remained invisible.
After the end of the war, queer people continued to be marginalised. Gay men in particular continued to suffer in large numbers under Paragraph 175, many of whom did not go free but were transferred from concentration camps directly to prisons.
The ongoing discrimination by state and society changed only slowly. In 1969, Paragraph 175 was reformed and criminal law liberalised. Beginning in the 1970s, new social movements emerged, including a homosexual emancipation movement. Various groups reclaimed the “pink triangle” as a symbol to stand up for the rights of queer people.
Lesbian and feminist groups also gained popularity during the 1970s. Although lesbian sexuality was not directly persecuted by the state, many suffered from the misogynistic legal situation. The legal preferential treatment of men made it difficult to live out lesbian relationships, due to discrimination in labor and marriage laws.
The emergence of HIV in the 1980s affected many gay men and trans* people: thousands became infected, developed AIDS, and died. The state did not help, but instead relied on stigmatising measures and an aggressive rhetoric of exclusion, especially in Bavaria. For those affected, this recalled the previous period of open persecution.
Thanks to the efforts of activists, the health, political, and social situation of LGBTQI+ persons has improved since the 1990s. Today, queer people in Germany can celebrate some achievements and are also represented in politics. However, much remains to be done for LGBTQI+ equality. In many places around the world the situation is increasingly deteriorating. Trans* people in particular continue to face great discrimination.
Therefore, the commitment to queer self-determination is not over, but more relevant than ever. Because in the end, it not only ensures the preservation of LGBTIQ* human rights, but creates a more just society for all.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing in the bottom image at left on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Head of a youth / Portrait of a boy (1901); and at right on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Pierrot (Nd) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Paul Hoecker (German, 1854-1910) Young Man’s Head Cover of Jugend magazine, volume 44, 1901 Public domain
A chapter of TO BE SEEN #QueerLives is dedicated to the artist Paul Hoecker (1854-1910). It was created in collaboration with @forummuenchenev, which researches Hoecker’s story to honor and commemorate his life and work.
Paul Hoecker shaped the Munich art scene in the late 19th century. After his homosexuality became known, the artist was excluded and fell into oblivion. As a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Hoecker had a great deal of influence during his lifetime: almost all the painters in the artist group “Die Scholle” and many illustrators for the magazines “Simplicissimus” and “Die Jugend” were among his students. The co-founder of the Munich Secession also received great recognition for his artistic work.
Hoecker privately exchanged views with the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld about the fact that he has “contrasexual tendencies”, i.e. is gay. When a sex worker was recognised in the model of his acclaimed work “Ave Maria”, he was involuntarily outed. Paul Hoecker forestalled a scandal by resigning from his professorship. In this way he was able to avoid having to take a public position on his sexuality. He withdrew first to Italy and later to his home in Silesia, Oberlangenau.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Paul Hoecker (11 August 1854, Oberlangenau – 13 January 1910, Munich) was a German painter of the Munich School and founding member of the Munich Secession…
The Munich Academy
In 1891, at the young age of 36, he was appointed to the Munich Academy, where he replaced Friedrich August von Kaulbach, who had resigned suddenly. He was the first teacher at the academy to take his students on field trips, which often lasted two weeks. He was also one of the first “modern” teachers there, exposing his students to impressionism and the latest developments from the Barbizon School. His studio was often referred to as the “Geniekasten” (Genius Box).
Due to the pervasive influence of Franz von Lenbach, very little exhibition space was available for any art that was considered modern. In 1892, shortly after being appointed a professor, this problem motivated Hoecker to become one of the founding members of the Munich Secession, acting as its secretary. The Secession ultimately inspired similar movements in Berlin and other cities.
Scandal
In 1897, a scandal broke out when it was rumoured that Hoecker had used a male prostitute as a model for a painting of the Madonna. Eventually, the scandal became more personal in nature, and he chose to resign from the academy. He then travelled to Capri, where he stayed at the Villa Lysis, home of industrialist and poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, who had left Paris in the wake of his own scandal. While there, Hoecker painted several portraits of Fersen’s lover, Nino Cesarini, a professional model. Though the Jugend magazine published one of his Nino portraits in 1904 – a fully clothed version. By 1901 he returned to Oberlangenau. In 1910, he died of what was diagnosed as “Roman Malaria”.
Posthumous recognition
Despite his important role for the Munich art scene of the late 19th century, Paul Hoecker is hardly known today. This is probably due to the fact that he left the professorship in connection with his homosexuality. In October 2019 a research group was formed at the Forum Queeres Archiv München to investigate the life and work of the painter. Part of the family owned estate of Paul Hoecker has found its way into the archive of the Forum Queeres Archiv München and was digitalised.
Elisàr August Emanuel von Kupffer (20 February 1872 – 31 October 1942) was a Baltic German artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym “Elisarion” for most of his writings…
Career
In 1895 he published Leben und Liebe (Life and Love), a book of poetry. In autumn of that year he moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin Art Academy and moved in with Von Mayer. The following year, he left Agnes and wrote the dramas Der Herr der Welt (Master of the World), and Irrlichter (Wisps) as well as three one-act plays. In 1897 he published the anthology Ehrlos (Infamous, or Dishonorable).
Von Mayer graduated in 1897 and they travelled throughout Italy, Sicily, Southern France and Geneva before returning to Berlin. They spent the summer in Thuringia and Heiligendamm and went back to Italy in 1899. Early next year, Adolf Brand published Von Kupffer’s influential anthology of homoerotic literature, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (roughly, “Love of Favourites and Love Between Friends in World Literature”. Lieblingminne is a neologism created by Von Kupffer). The anthology was researched and created, in part, as a protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England. It was reprinted in 1995.
In 1908 he published a book on Il Sodoma, the Renaissance artist. In 1911, he and Von Mayer founded the publishing house Klaristische Verlag Akropolis in Munich and Von Kupffer published three major works: a play, Aino und Tio, Hymnen der heiligen Burg (Hymns of the Holy Castle) and Ein neuer Flug und eine heilige Burg (A New Flight and a Holy Castle). His work was also published and reviewed in the gay magazine Akademos, published by Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. That same year, he and Von Meyer announced the creation of a “new religion”, Klarismus (Clarity), and established a community in Weimar. The following year he published a book on Klarismus called Der unbekannte Gott (The Unknown God). In 1913, the Brogi Gallery in Florence hosted his first art exhibition. Later that year, a Klarist community was established in Zürich.
Later life and death
In 1915, with World War I in progress and growing animosity towards Germans, they left Italy and moved to Ticino, where Von Kupffer established himself as a painter and muralist in Locarno, Switzerland. They were granted Swiss citizenship in 1922. From 1925 to 1929 they transformed their villa in Minusio, near Lake Maggiore, into an opulent collection of art, the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion”. He was also a photographer, making photographic studies of boys for use in the creation of his paintings, but most of his works featured a youthful version of himself. The Klarist “Elisarion Community” was founded at Minusio in 1926. During the 1930s, the number of visitors increased, then sharply decreased; stopping altogether just before the onset of World War II.
As his health declined, he became reclusive and died on 31 October 1942. Since 1981 the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion” has been a Museum dedicated to Von Kupffer’s work. The villa was willed to the municipality of Minusio, and his ashes are interred inside, together with Von Meyer’s. The Elisarion Community was satirically referenced as the “Polysadrion” (roughly; Place of Many Idiots), in the 1931 novel Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky.
Germaine Luise Krull (20 November 1897 – 31 July 1985) was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorised as German, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as “an especially outspoken example” of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who “could lead lives free from convention”, she is best known for photographically illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.
Max Peiffer Watenphul (German, 1896-1976) Stillleben mit Mimosen (Still Life with Mimosas) 1932
Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896 – 13 July 1976) was a German artist. Described as a “lyric poet of painting”, he belongs to a “tradition of German painters for whom the Italian landscape represented Arcadia.” In addition to Mediterranean scenes, he regularly depicted Salzburg and painted many still lifes of flowers. As well as oil paintings, his extensive body of work encompasses watercolours, drawings, enamel, textiles, graphic art, and photographs.
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili with a Feather Fan 1920
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili Elbe c. 1928
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) At the mirror 1931-1936
On December 31, 1932 … this advertisement for Hella Knabe’s tailoring studio appeared in “Die Freund”. In the 1920s, a separate infrastructure was also created for “transvestites” – people who preferred the clothing of the opposite sex, including trans* people. Hella Knabe’s made-to-measure studio became a nationwide attraction. The hairdresser and seamstress, whose husband was a “transvestite” himself, advertised not only in scene magazines, but also in national magazines such as Jugend and Simplicissimus.
Hella Knabe made women’s underwear, artificial busts, corsets and chastity belts for her customers and ran a mail order business. In addition, she received boarders, clothed them, applied make-up and enabled them to live in the opposite sex for a short time. She continued to offer her services after 1933 and kept in touch with her clients through her own magazine with subcultural content. In 1938 she was therefore fined for distributing “lewd literature”.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Damenbar (Lesbian Bar) c. 1930-1932 Lithograph
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Siesta c. 1930-1932
Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter and illustrator of the Weimar period. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements. She is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life.
Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin, the daughter of a successful German merchant. She and her family moved to Paris when she was five years old. She studied art in Paris, Brussels and Rome from 1906-1911. Her early work, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadent movement, was exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1912 and 1913.
In 1916 Mammen and her family fled Paris to avoid internment during World War I. While her parents moved to Amsterdam, Mammen chose instead to return to Berlin. She was now financially on her own for the first time, as the French government had confiscated all of her family’s property. For several years Mammen struggled to make ends meet, taking any work she could find, and spending time with people from different class backgrounds. These experiences and newfound sympathies are reflected in her artwork from the period.
In time Mammen was able to find work as a commercial artist, producing fashion plates, movie posters, and caricatures for satirical journals such as Simplicissimus, Ulk, and Jugend. In the mid-1920s she became known for her illustrations evoking the urban atmosphere of Berlin. Much of her artwork depicted women. These women subjects often included haughty socialites, fashionable middle-class shop girls, street singers, and prostitutes. Her drawings were often compared to those of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s she worked mainly in pencil with watercolour washes, and in pen and ink.
In 1921, Mammen moved into an apartment with her sister in Berlin. This apartment was a former photographer’s studio which she lived in until her death. Aside from Art throughout her life Mammen also was interested in science. She was close friends with Max Delbrück who left Europe and took some of her artwork with him and exhibited them in California. In addition to bringing these art works to be exhibited he also sent Mammen care packages from the United States with art supplies.
In 1930 she had a major exhibition in the Fritz Gurlitt gallery. Over the next two years, at Gurlitt’s suggestion, she created one of her most important works: a series of eight lithographs illustrating Les Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs.
In 1933, following Mammen’s inclusion in an exhibition of female artists in Berlin, the Nazi authorities denounced her motifs and subjects as “Jewish”, and banned her lithographs for Les Chansons de Bilitis. The Nazis were also opposed to her blatant disregard to for apparent ‘appropriate’ female submissiveness in her expressions of her subjects. Much of her work also includes imagery of lesbians. The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for, and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies. Until the end of the war she practiced a kind of “inner emigration”. She stopped exhibiting her work and focused on advertising. For a time she also peddled second-hand books from a handcart.
In the 1940s, in a show of solidarity, Mammen began experimenting with Cubism and expressionism, a risky move given the Nazis’ condemnation of abstract art as “degenerate”. After the war she took to collecting wires, string, and other materials from the streets of bombed-out Berlin to create reliefs. In the late 1940s she began exhibiting her work again, as well as designing sets for the Die Badewanne cabaret. She created abstract collages from various materials, including candy wrappers. In the 1950s she adopted a new style, combining thick layers of oil paint with a few fine marks on the surface.
In the 1970s there was a resurgence of interest in Mammen’s early work as German art historians, as well as art historians of the women’s movement, rediscovered her paintings and illustrations from the Weimar period. In 2013 her later, more abstract work was featured in “Painting Forever!”, a large-scale exhibition held during Berlin Art Week. In 2017-2018, the Berlinische Galerie mounted a major exhibition of Mammen’s work, titled, “Jeanne Mammen: Die Beobachterin: Retrospektive 1910-1975” (Jeanne Mammen: The Observer: Retrospective 1910-1975), which included more than 170 works in various media, covering the period from the 1920s to her late work in the 1960s and beyond. The show was conceived as an update to a show mounted by the Galerie at the Martin Gropius Bau in 1997, which featured primarily works from the 1920s. In 2010 the Des Moines Art Center exhibited 13 water colour paintings done by Mammen which were inspired by Berlin in the Weimer era.
Renée Sintenis, née Renate Alice Sintenis (20 March 1888 – 22 April 1965), also known as Frau Emil R. Weiss, was a German sculptor, medallist, and graphic artist who worked in Berlin. She created mainly small-sized animal sculptures, female nudes, portraits, and sports statuettes. She is especially known for her Berlin Bear sculptures, which was used as the design for the Berlinale’s top film award, the Golden Bear…
Career
When Renée Sintenis (as she called herself from then on) met the sculptor Georg Kolbe in 1910, she became his model. She modelled for a now lost life-sized statue.
Inspired by this activity, she began creating in sculpture female nudes, expressive heads like those of André Gide and Joachim Ringelnatz, athletes like the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, and self-portraits in drawings, sculptures (in terracotta) and etchings.
After 1915, the concise animal figures emerged, which became the subject of her artistic life. Since she rejected monumentality in sculpture, she mainly created small-format sculptures. These small works of art such as horses, deers, donkeys and dogs, enjoyed great popularity with the public because they were cheaper, suitable as gifts and could be placed in small rooms.
From attending Kolbe’s studio, a long-term friendship developed, which he accompanied artistically. In the 1913 Berlin autumn exhibition, the first major exhibition of the Free Secession, Sintenis took part (as in the following years) with small-format plaster sculptures.
From 1913 on, she had her works cast in the Hermann Noack fine art foundry, which she attended artistically for decades.
In 1917 she married the type artist, book designer, painter and illustrator Emil Rudolf Weiß, whom she had met years earlier as her teacher and was also and then as a fatherly friend. He supported her and introduced her to numerous other artists. Their collaboration was limited to a few joint projects, of which the edition of the 22 Songs of the poems by Sappho, for which she created the etchings and Weiß made the font designs, achieved particular fame.
From 1913 she exhibited her sculptures regularly and was highly valued by her colleagues from the Free Secession, the most important Berlin artists’ association, among others, by Max Liebermann, Max Beckmann, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The opening of a gallery in Berlin in 1922 made her the most important protagonist of the well-known Flechtheim art circle in those years. The art-interested public was infatuated with her athletic figures, portraits of friends and the small-format self-portraits.
In addition, due to her body size, slim figure, charisma, her self-confident, fashionable demeanor and androgynous beauty, she was often portrayed by artists like her husband, Emil Rudolf Weiß and Georg Kolbe, and by photographers, like Hugo Erfurth, Fritz Eschen and Frieda Riess. She embodied perfectly the type of the ‘new woman’ of the 1920s, even if she appeared rather reserved.
During the Weimar Republic, Renée Sintenis became an internationally recognised artist, with exhibitions in the Berlin Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, in Paris, the Tate Gallery, in London, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, Glasgow and Rotterdam. Her small-sized depictions of athletes (boxers, footballers, runners) and portrait busts of their circle of friends were found in public and private collections around the world.
In 1928 Sintenis won the bronze medal in the sculpture section of the art competition for the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, for her “Footballeur”. She is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ Olympic medallist. Renée Sintenis took part in the 1929 exhibition of the German Association of Artists in the Cologne State House, with five small-format animal sculptures. In 1930 she met the French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Berlin. In 1931 she was appointed as the first sculptor, and second woman after Käthe Kollwitz, together with 13 other artists, to join the Berlin Academy of the Arts – Fine Arts section, although the National Socialists forced her to leave in 1934.
In 1932, she created a statue of the Berlin Bear, a bear standing on its hind legs with its arms raised, based on the Coat of arms of Berlin. The design was popular, and she sold many 15 cm (5.9 in) statues of the bear, which brought wealth and was taken up again in later life.
Third Reich
Emil Rudolf Weiß was dismissed from his university post on 1 April 1933, because of an angry statement against the Nazi regime and the law to reintroduce the civil service. Sintenis herself was excluded from the Academy of the Arts in 1934 because of her Jewish origins – her maternal grandmother was Jewish before her conversion. Nevertheless, she was able to stay in the Reich Chamber of Culture, even if her works were removed from public collections by the National Socialists.
During the Third Reich, Renée Sintenis and her husband Emil Rudolf Weiß lived with considerable restrictions. She continued to exhibit, although one of her self-portraits was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1934. Since she was not banned from exhibiting, she was represented in Düsseldorf by the art dealer Alex Vömel, Flechtheim’s successor. In contrast to the 1920s, she was not doing well financially, which was reinforced by the bronze casting ban of 1941.
Until the forced dissolution of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1936, Sintenis remained a member of the German Association of Artists. That she was sponsored by the NSDAP propagandist Hans Hinkel, as it was later claimed, has not been proven and is highly unlikely.
Her husband died unexpectedly on 7 November 1942 in Meersburg on the Lake Constance. His death plunged Sintenis into a deep crisis. As a result, she took over his studio in the Künstlerhaus on Kurfürstenstrasse, where Max Pechstein also worked. His family took temporarily on her when her studio house was destroyed by arson and several Allied bombings in 1945. Sintenis lost almost all of her possessions; all papers and parts of her work were lost. While most of the cast models were preserved, the plaster frames of most of the portrait heads were also destroyed. In a self-portrait mask from 1944, the hardships of the war years are visible in her features.
Post-war career
After the war, Sintenis and her partner Magdalena Goldmann moved into an apartment on Innsbrucker Strasse in 1945, where they both lived until their deaths. In 1948, Sintenis received the art prize of the city of Berlin and was appointed by Karl Hofer to the Berlin University of Fine Arts. She was appointed full professor in 1955, although she gave up teaching the same year. She was also appointed to the newly founded Academy of the Arts of Berlin (West) in 1955.
In the 1950s, she became very successful once again. She stayed true to her artistic focus and motifs, which she called “making animals”.
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) Girl Under Trees 2016 Courtesy the artist Photo: @frau_orla
In “These hands – a world without equal” (2022, below), the artist Lena Rosa Händle explores the continuation of hidden lesbian codes from the 1920s to the present day. Händle refers to the dancer Tilly Losch, the painter Mariette Lydis and the artist Claude Cahun and focuses on the motif of the hands as a gesture and code of lesbian people. In her photographs, @lenarosahaendle, together with DJane and curator @tonicahunter, reinterprets traditional gestures and is reminiscent of the first female photo studios of the 1920s.
For her work “Girls under Trees” (2016, above), Händle draws on the motif of a tapestry that schoolgirls painstakingly embroidered in 1941 in needlework classes, which were compulsory for girls at the time. Händle adds two personal ads from the newsreel published in Vienna in 1942 to the motif: “Miss is looking for correspondence with a girlfriend under modern” and “Lady wants a girlfriend for the purpose of cinema and theatre”. Advertisements like these are testimonies to the few coded signs of lesbian subculture during the Nazi era. Terms such as “Miss”, “Girlfriend” and “Lady” served as lesbian identification codes, as did the colours lilac and violet. In doing so, the artist sensitively refers to issues such as political power structures, socially enforced expectations and the resulting subtlety of lesbian aesthetics.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) These hands – a world without equal 2022 Courtesy the artist
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing Wolfgang Tillmans’s photograph The Cock (Kiss) (2002, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) The Cock (Kiss) 2002 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz
In their audiovisual piece Schreber is a Woman, the Barcelona-based artists’ collective El Palomar delves into the mind of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German lawyer (1842-1911) who became famous for his reports from a psychiatric clinic that later inspired Freud. In his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness from 1903 Schreber recounts feeling like a woman, among other experiences. The book influenced Sigmund Freud to elaborate his theories on paranoia and schizophrenia. Relevant to Schreber’s story is the fact that his father, Dr. Moritz Schreber, authored several books that proposed strict authoritarian models for the physical and moral education of children, which were very popular in Germany and other parts of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.
El Palomar uncover and reinterpret the writings of Schreber from a transfeminist perspective to deconstruct the Freudian link between Schreber and schizoprenic paranoia trough a queer viewpoint. Focusing on the images and sounds that Schreber describes in his memoirs, the film offers a rereading of the case as rooted in a period when gender identities were restricted to classical binary archetypes. Schreber is a Woman subverts the original circumstances of queer lineage, recontextualizing gender and pleasure in the present.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing work from Philipp Gufler’s series Quilts, in the bottom image Quilt #43 (Sophia Goudstikker) (2021) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Philipp Gufler (German, b. 1989) Quilt #50 (Lil Picard) 2022 Screenprint on fabric Courtesy the artist and Galerie Françoise Heitsch Photo: @frau_orla
In his quilts Philipp Gufler references queer artists, scholars, and places of queer life that have found little or no place in written memories and the historical canon. The series thus becomes an alternative archive that generates a form of intergenerational memory through the technique of “quilting.” In this technique the textiles left behind by deceased people are reassembled and contextualised. The fine materiality of the fabrics stands in direct contrast to the often massive, solid stone monuments of Western historiography. By reusing a variety of historical relics, he creates diverse personal and ancestral forms of memory of different origins. The choice of materials in the works is just as important as the choice of motifs and the associated stories that are told.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) In Frauenkleidung (In Women’s Clothing) 2019 Courtesy the artists and Edition Mosaik Salzburg Foto: @frau_orla
The poetry collection “In Frauenkleidung” (In Women’s Clothing, above) is a joint work by the lyricist Zoltán Lesi and the designer Ricardo Portilho and is dedicated to the lives of intergender athletes in the early 1930s. In their book, both artists combine documentary language with historical photographs and newspaper clippings drawn from Lesi’s image archive, which has been in the making since 2017. The resulting surrealistic collage uses historical distance to question facts, construction, and truth in a humorous yet sensitive way.
Parallel to the publication, they have created the audio installation “Ein Sprung und der Hummer” (A Jump and the Lobster, below) which, in the form of a Dadaist assemblage inspired by Joseph Cornell, blurs the line between fiction and the documentation of the biographies of the athletes, contributing another layer to the narrative level of the book of poems.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and the Lobster) (installation view) 2018/2022 Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and The Lobster) (installation view) 2018/2022 Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1 80333 Munich Phone: +49 (0)89 233-67000
![Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) 'Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized]' 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/ilse-bing-seated-woman-with-necklace.jpg "Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) 'Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized]' 1943")
![Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969 from the exhibition 'Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany' at Fondazione Prada, Milan, April - July, 2025](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2-typologien_heinrich-riebesehl_siae_sm.jpg "Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969 from the exhibition 'Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany' at Fondazione Prada, Milan, April - July, 2025")
![Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/1-typologien_heinrich-riebesehl_siae_sm.jpg "Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969")
![Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) 'Eichenblatt [Oak Leaf]' 1965](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/8-typologien_hilla-becher_sm.jpg "Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) 'Eichenblatt [Oak Leaf]' 1965")
![Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel' [Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds] Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/5-typologien_karl-blossfeldt_sm.jpg "Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel' [Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds] Nd")
![August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln' [Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne] 1931-1950s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6-typologien_august-sander_siae_sm.jpg "August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln' [Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne] 1931-1950s")
![Erich Sander for August Sander's studio. 'Politischer Häftling' [Political Prisoner] 1941-1944 (print date late 1940s)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/7-typologien_august-sander_siae_sm.jpg "Erich Sander for August Sander's studio. 'Politischer Häftling' [Political Prisoner] 1941-1944 (print date late 1940s)")
![Ursula Böhmer (German, b. 1965) 'Highland Grampians / Scotland [All Ladies – Cows in Europe]' 2011](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/21-typologien_ursula-bohmer_sm.jpg "Ursula Böhmer (German, b. 1965) 'Highland Grampians / Scotland [All Ladies – Cows in Europe]' 2011")
![Lotte Jacobi (American born Poland, 1896-1990) 'Folkwang-Auriga-Verlag, Orch 152. Neottia nidus avis. Vogel-Nestwurz, einzelne Blüte' [Bird's-nest orchid, single flower] c. 1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/4-typologien_lotte-jacobi_sm.jpg "Lotte Jacobi (American born Poland, 1896-1990) 'Folkwang-Auriga-Verlag, Orch 152. Neottia nidus avis. Vogel-Nestwurz, einzelne Blüte' [Bird's-nest orchid, single flower] c. 1930")
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