On German Photography Today

Photography training in postwar Germany has thrived on what turned out to be a fruitful rivalry between East and West.

In East Germany, the Leipziger Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst (Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts) isn’t only one of the oldest art schools in Germany, but also the first to create a chair of artistic photography, in 1913. After 1945 it was the leading institute for photography training in virtually the entire Warsaw Pact, bar a few film schools in Poland, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. In West Germany there were several strong personalities, among them Otto Steinert – who taught first in Saarbrücken and then from 1959 in Essen – and somewhat younger colleagues like Pan Walther or Gottfried Jäger, most of whom epitomized a highly subjective approach.

In the early 1980s East German photography became a coveted trade article in the West, and Bernd Becher was appointed to teach photography at the Düsseldorf Academy. The 1980s were marked by competition between the two academies in Düsseldorf and Leipzig, which wasn’t checked by reunification in 1990, but exacerbated by new recruitment from Leipzig. The last school Otto Steinert worked at in Essen suffered a severe blow when it was incorporated into the university there – a setback even a committed pedagogue like Angela Neuke couldn’t make good before her early accidental death in 1997. Then as now, photography training doesn’t seem to be able to get away from the traditional academic system of class-based tutelage. But it is branching out in diverse directions, which, judging by international standards, provides a congenial basis on the whole for photography training in Germany.

Düsseldorf

From 1976–96 Bernd Becher ran a class at the Düsseldorf Academy that succeeded in maintaining excellent standards of artistic quality in German photography through three generations of pupils. Becher’s protégé Thomas Ruff took over from his mentor in 2000, and Christopher Williams has held this chair since 2008.

Since the early 1990s Thomas Ruff has focussed almost exclusively on reworking photographs from old archives, collections and newspapers. He reproduces them, sometimes altering them in the process, and above all enlarging them to proportions which, along with their exposition at shows and museums, establish them as artworks – photography as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and, above and beyond that, pointing to the pointlessness of insisting on objective representation.

Ruff’s students at the Düsseldorf Academy had by and large stuck by this programme. What will come of more recent developments at the Academy remains to be seen.

Leipzig

Around 1990, Timm Rautert and Joachim Brohm, two leading lights in West German photography in the 1970s and ’80s, took charge of the instruction at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts; a number of teachers from the old establishment were still on the faculty then, but like Rautert they have since left the school. The most well-known products of the Leipzig Academy to date are, in the main, complex forms of documentary photography, such as Katja Klose’s socially engaged works or Anna Katharina Olthoff’s portrait series. Both figured prominently at the Leipzig F/STOP Festival in 2008, which was closely tied to the Leipzig Academy, but is now emerging from its shadow. During Joachim Brohm’s stint as president of the academy, Heidi Specker will be filling in for him in the classroom; and two more high-profile figures in the German photography scene, Tina Bara and Peter Piller, are now teaching in Leipzig.

Other schools

Generally speaking, a look at other schools confirms that photography has indeed made it into the realm of art: photo projects are virtually ubiquitous in classes run by sculptors, light artists, painters and draughtsmen. But straight photography courses are still given too here and there, especially at schools that put more or less equal emphasis on teaching art and design.

A number of German polytechnics (Fachhochschulen or FH for short) offer photography courses with a wide range of different approaches, like Rolf Nobel’s class at the Fachhochschule in Hannover, Katharina Bosse’s at the FH in Bielefeld or Susanne Brügger’s in Dortmund, to name just a few. They point up the long-standing conflict in the stringently regulated polytechnic curriculum between state-ordained educational objectives and the demand for artistic licence in photographic art.

At the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe College of Design), photography is part and parcel of Media Art, and Elger Esser’s class – reinforced by various visiting professors – follows this credo through a vast array of artistic pursuits. Regardless of the influence of the Becher school from Düsseldorf on the Karlsruhe College, the latter has produced major series of portraits and interiors like those of Frederik Busch and narrative sequences like those of Patricia Roeder. More pointedly application-oriented and with a specific penchant for portrayals of architectonic space, Peter Bialobrzeski’s classes in Bremen and those of Vladimir Spacek in Mainz get plenty of public exposure at any number of shows. Just recently, Wiebke Leister took Jörg Sasse’s place as artistic professor of photography at the Folkwangschule in Essen, while Wolfgang Tillmans’ class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt seems too low-profile to attract much attention.

So once again the position of photography at German art schools appears to be such that project groups form time and again in various classes and inject quite remarkable impetus into the photo scene, but then turn to other media again. One case in point is light artist Daniel Hausig’s class at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken Academy of Fine Arts). Apparently no less important, however, is the growing sway of private schools which, though primarily geared toward aspiring designers, nonetheless consistently put successful participants in the running at art exhibitions.