MADE IN GERMANY. German Photography from the 19th Century until Today

This exhibition gives an overview of German photography with iconic masterpieces from the 1850s to the present, with a main focus on the nineteenth century, the 1920s-30s and postwar avant-garde, the 1970s and 1980s documentary turn in West and East Germany as well as contemporary positions.

Early in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was adopted all over German countries and capitals as an important means of representation. The first decades of the twentieth century saw an enormous rise in photography in Germany, due to technical improvements and the need for images in the emerging mass media, such as illustrated magazines. Especially in Germany, photography and film flourished due to innovations, and avant-garde masters laid the foundations for new ways of seeing.

World War II brought a brutal disruption to artistic photographic practices. The postwar generations sought to revive avant-garde photography, creating new visual languages using the means of perspective, cropping and darkroom experimentation. The following decades saw a turn towards conceptual and documentary perspectives. Both in East and West Germany, with diverse imagery, photography bore testimony to a scintillating era that was both unsettling and full of promise. Contemporary German photographers create distinctive views of the world surrounding us – at home and abroad – characterized by sober, objective and yet highly personal visions.

The Beginnings – An Excerpt

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, representation and documentation were among the most important functions of the new medium. Architecture and historical monuments, landscapes and urban environments, nature and foreign countries developed into popular photographic genres. Leopold Ahrendts (1825-70), for instance, captured spectacular urban views in Prussia’s capital, Berlin. Ahrendts was among the first nineteenth century photographers in Germany to document both representative sites as well as picturesque scenes in Berlin. Originally a painter and lithographer, he turned to photography like many of his contemporaries, and became one of the earliest and most accomplished architectural photographers of his time.

Pictorialism

Pictorialism rose in late nineteenth-century international art photography, making photographic expression a means for personal visions and techniques beyond machine-made images. Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944) contributed seminal images to the movement, notably large-format gum bichromate prints. Dresden-born Kühn, one of the most important Pictorialists, championed art photography as an artist, theorist, and inventor of innovations such as the soft-focus lens. He maintained close contact with the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who featured Kühn’s work prominently in his Camera Work magazine.

Germany between the Wars: New Objectivity and New Vision

The interwar period in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany proved to be visually prolific, both in terms of documentary and experimental imagery, with the movements known today as New Objectivity and New Vision. The former style includes Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) and his plant studies, the architectural portrayals of Werner Mantz (1901-83), the object-worlds of Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966), portraits and still lifes by Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) or August Sander’s (1876-1964) monumental sociological portrait typology of the people of the 20th Century. Helmar Lerski (1870-1956), too, excelled in portraiture, which he considered to be the art of light. Albert Renger-Patzsch captured the notion of an objective view of objects, creatures and environments in his seminal book Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful) from 1928. August Sander’s visionary documentary portrait oeuvre exemplified an era beyond the subject itself and his influence on the work of many international artists is undisputed until today.

New Vision was characterized by manifold experimental approaches, for example in groundbreaking reportage photography by Umbo (i.e. Otto Umbehr, 1902-80) and in truly avant-garde portraits and nude studies by Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969). Umbo, who studied at the Bauhaus Weimar, contributed to portraiture with his signature close-up head-shots and to photojournalism with his ambitious reportage. With a Surrealist sense of humor and darkroom experiments that made each print a unique image, Berlin-born Erwin Blumenfeld was one of the most innovative and influential artists of the twentieth century working in nude and fashion photography.

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius and based in Weimar and Dessau, was the most important design school of the era, and photography played an essential role there, be it as a means of documenting architecture, products and workshop activities or as a record of the masters’ and students’ everyday life and work. Edmund Collein (1906-92), for instance, shot the students of Bauatelier Gropius, while Franz Ehrlich (1907-84)and Heinz Loew (1903-81) documented their study for light advertisements from the plastic arts workshop – a little photographic gem in its own right – and Hajo Rose (1910-89)cross-faded a self-portrait and Bauhaus architecture. Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) or Gertrud Arndt (1903-2000) created intense and experimental portraits and T. Lux Feininger (1910-2011) took pictures of the Bauhaus band, while Ellen Auerbach (1906-2004), Grete Stern (1904-1999) and Horacio Coppola (1906-2012) composed product still lifes, to name but a few.

Postwar: Subjective Photography

After World War II, German photographers sought to revive avant-garde practices in photography. The artist, teacher and collector Otto Steinert (1915-78) formulated avant-gardist principles with his Subjective Photography movement. Preceded by the group fotoform, with Peter Keetman (1916-2005), Siegfried Lauterwasser (1913-2000), Toni Schneiders (1920-2006) and Ludwig Windstosser (1921-83) as members, young artists used the camera lens to capture a diverse play of forms based on reality, but with a clear tendency towards abstraction, in line with international art of the era in other media. Steinert, who was an influential professor of photography, first at Saarbrücken Art School, then at the renowned Folkwang Art School in Essen, passed his signature abstract style of “absolute photographic creation” on to his students. He was also an influential collector, who laid the brickwork for the present photography collection at Museum Folkwang – one of the most famous in Germany – with his Study Collection of the Folkwang School.

East German Views

In the German Democratic Republic (1949-1989) photography was considered primarily an instrument of illustration. Nonetheless, art photography flourished, with documentary perspectives on quotidian life as the focus of choice for many photographers. This comprised subjects ranging from representations of the self and the other to real conditions of the world surrounding them and daily life, as well as landscapes and cityscapes. Intimate portrayals of the human figure and face characterize the work of East Germans Ute Mahler (*1949), Ursula Arnold (1929-2012) or Helga Paris (*1938). Sibylle Bergemann (1941-2010) and Arno Fischer (1927-2011) depict everyday life in poetic series and fashion shoots. Fischer, who taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) was an influential teacher: he shared his sense of personal expression as well as technical skills with his students, and, together with Ursula Arnold and others, participated in the innovative “action fotografie” group in late 1950s Leipzig.

West German Documentary

The conceptual photography of West Germans Wilhelm Schürmann (*1946) and Heinrich Riebesehl (1938-2010) features habitats like urban streets or agricultural landscapes devoid of human beings. Schürmann espoused the new German documentary style not only as a photographer, but also as a curator (in collaboration with Klaus Honnef at Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn: the seminal exhibition “In Deutschland. Aspekte gegenwärtiger Dokumentarfotografie” (In Germany. Aspects of Contemporary Documentary Photography), 1979. A documentary yet personal approach to portraiture becomes manifest in André Gelpke’s (*1947) work. Rudolf Holtappel (1923-2013) focuses on the coexistence of industrial and residential districts in the West German Ruhr area.

Conceptual Photography from Düsseldorf

The archetype of contemporary typology is certainly Bernd and Hilla Becher’s (1931-2007; 1934-2015) industrial archaeology, which was clearly influenced by August Sander’s seminal typological portrait work. The Bechers not only established a singularly conceptual approach in industrial photography. With Bernd Becher’s chair at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, they also initiated a unique style of observation and photographic creation, which they passed on to their students, such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth or Candida Höfer, among others. Today the “Düsseldorf School of Photography” is the most celebrated and well-known movement in contemporary photographic art. Götz Diergarten (*1972) and Claus Goedicke (*1966), whose work is genuinely devoted to a typological understanding of architecture and the still life, represent the younger generations of Becher students in the present show.

Performance and Experiment

A different, yet equally conceptual means of creation features the art of performance and action, as exemplified in Jürgen Klauke’s (1943) series with a strong focus on the transformation of the self and questions of identity and gender. Floris Neusüss (*1937) combines performative practices and action-based photographic creation in his body photograms, life-size imprints on photographic paper. Floris Neusüss was active as a teacher and curator of conceptual photography at Fotoforum Kassel, a gallery at the Kassel Academy of Fine Arts, since the early 1970s. A staging of a different kind takes place in fashion photography: two key positions here are F.C. Gundlach (*1926) and Helmut Newton (1920-2004). The latter revolutionized the genre with his stunning images of a new type of women.

Contemporary Positions

Typologically precise and pared-down views of architecture and objects as well as land- and cityscapes are featured in conceptual approaches, such as those of Joachim Brohm (*1955), Götz Diergarten (*1972), Claus Goedicke (*1966) or Hans-Christian Schink (*1961). Jitka Hanzlová (*1958) embraces environments and their inhabitants, whether human or animal, in personal portraits. While Götz Diergarten and Claus Goedicke represent the Düsseldorf School, other currents of documentary styles with a personal touch are also exhibited here. Joachim Brohm and Jitka Hanzlová graduated from Essen’s Folkwangschule, where subtle, individualistic color photography was propagated, while Hans-Christian Schink was one of the students at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig who began studying during the German Democratic Republic, and liberated their artistic vision after German reunification. Brohm pioneered documentary color photography with his early typological work, recently republished in the book Typology 1979. Schink’s subtle contemporary landscape photography practice is characterized by clarity, legibility, and precision, be it in East German transport projects, Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit (2004) or in the Japanese region of Tohoku (2012), which was devastated by a tsunami.

The distinctive visions of life and political culture in each of the two Germanys reveal the unique capacity of photography to distill and mediate our aesthetic perceptions of today and the recent past.

Carolin Förster