On German Photography Today

Many historical and social models of society are based on age groups for the purpose of systematic description; in the fine arts, the artists’ age seems to have been decisive in producing a wide range of contemporaneous styles in many periods.



In the following essay, this age-based approach is applied, if only superficially, to contemporary German photography in an attempt to round out the prevailing school-based model and the associated breakdown by areas of application in design. If we leave out the generation currently enrolled in art academies and photography classes, we can break German photographers down into three peer groups: the over 70s, the “50-somethings”, and those close to 40 years of age. For each of these generations we’ll look at three exponents whose work, though not necessarily very prominent, is nevertheless particularly representative of their age group.

F. C. Gundlach – Arno Fischer – Michael Ruetz

The undisputed doyen of German photography is F. C. Gundlach, who was a trendsetting fashion photographer in the 1950s along with Regi Relang, Rico Puhlmann and the young Helmut Newton, and was chiefly active at the interface between German fashion and the international press. In the ’70s he ran a photo gallery in Hamburg – one of the first of its kind in Germany –, where he showcased fellow photographers like Herbert Tobias and started putting together a gigantic collection. For some years now the latter has been part of the Haus der Fotografie in Hamburg, which Gundlach also initiated and promoted. But this restless mover and shaker is now busy on an even more ambitious project: to set up a foundation specially devoted to safeguarding the legacies and collections of German photographers for posterity.

Arno Fischer is in many respects his opposite number, though of similarly great importance. Still a controversial photographer in Eastern Germany and passed over for academic advancement, Fischer has prevailed against all odds and is now recognized as a seminal influence on several generations of photojournalists and author/photographers with his series of starkly poetic pictures. Like Fischer, the somewhat younger Michael Ruetz – famous for his coverage of the student protest movements in 1968 Berlin – can be considered a photo-essayist: Ruetz has devoted years, even decades, to documenting handpicked subjects like the passage of time and eternity.

Andreas Gursky – Candida Höfer – Claudia Fährenkemper

The generation of the 50-somethings comprises the majority of present-day photo-artists, and can also be showcased by representative practitioners. Two exponents of the middle generation of Bernd Becher’s pupils have been selected here to that end. Andreas Gursky, whose large-format colour photographs fetched the highest prices in the photo market between 1995 and 2008, is assiduously forging ahead with his precision work that involves fusing disparate images to produce large tableaux of painterly perfection.

For Candida Höfer, who trained as a commercial photographer, this approach would certainly be inconceivable. Her photos of interior spaces of all kinds have tended in recent years to focus on evoking their respective memory lanes, which has moved her work into the vicinity of literature. Her pictures from libraries, as with the series on the various sculptural versions of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais or her works from closed museums, are images, reposing in themselves, of an artistic representation of space and effect.

Claudia Fährenkemper works with several teams on probing the visual universe of the scanning electron microscope: her undivided focus is on the sculptural aesthetics of biology, a realm that fascinated Adolf Hoelzel and many other artists before her.

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Mona Breede – Melanie Wiora – Beate Geissler und Oliver Sann

The next generation between 30 and 40 years of age is already launching a full-power offensive on the market of art galleries, fairs and group exhibitions. We have selected from among their ranks three practitioners whose work is representative of wider strands in contemporary German photography. Although Mona Breede studied design and media art, i.a. under Thomas Struth, she has nevertheless meanwhile developed her own work to such an extent that any reference to former mentors is now hardly discernible. Her photographic work does not differentiate between classic physical-chemical photography and its electronic derivatives. She simply uses both: for shots the large-format camera in best pictorial quality and for further processing computerised methods. The borders between processed and unprocessed pictures are so fluid that hardly anyone is able to distinguish the pictures based on this criterion.

Melanie Wiora takes this method even further, but in her work one also notices that she studied painting before absolving a course in media art. In her portraits she occasionally uses old pictorial techniques such as infra-red photography and long exposure times; in her series Eyescapes, with which she was represented in many exhibitions in recent years, she photographs with the requisite equipment directly into her eye, so that the reflection of the pupil forms the actual picture – surrounded by eyelashes and the lighter parts of the eye. The theme of distance and proximity is also of great significance in her latest works.

In recent years Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann have shot a number of documentary photo series focussing on the subject of computer games, which were shown in many places. In particular, several portraits of players at so-called ego-shooters demonstrate impressively the changes in personality and attitude during these games. For their latest work they have, as it were, turned the tables of their observation: during a study visit to the Veste Rosenberg in Kronach they re-enacted scenes from these computer games with amateur actors, shot as large-format photographs as well as videos – of course without any further computerised processing. The results are extremely humorous works – a cheerful reference from the mid-thirties to the generation of their children, who will quite naturally grow up with these kinds of games.