Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

The author Friedrich Dürrenmatt sits at a huge desk, leaning over a sheet of paper. He is writing, only the tips of his toes touch the floor. The writer seems to have forgotten the photographer. One almost feels indiscreet, watching him like this as he writes. He seems oblivious to the eye of the beholder, allowing the latter to study the paintings on the walls, Dürrenmatt's clothing, his desk. He has put his large spectacles down in front of him, beside them is a glass.

Barbara Klemm allows the observer to pry around in Dürrrenmatt's room like a detective. She has photographed a portrait focussing on the top of his almost bald head. It takes pride of place in the black and white photo in oblong format. It can be seen in Barbara Klemm's latest photo essay Künstlerporträts (i.e. Artists' Portraits)

“The eye of the F.A.Z.”

Barbara Klemm, born in Münster, trained as a portrait photographer. Since 1959 she has been working for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, first as a photo-laboratory technician, since 1970 on the editorial staff specialising in features and politics. Her pictures have appeared since then almost daily in the F.A.Z.. As a photo correspondent she has worked in Africa, Asia, America and Europe. As an honorary professor, the 64-year-old teaches photography at the Fachhochschule (University for Applied Science) in Darmstadt. She has received numerous prizes, including the Dr. Erich Salomon Award for her commitment to photo journalism, the Hugo Erfurth Award and the Maria Sibylla Merian Award for visual artists, and she is a member of the renowned Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (i.e. German Society for Photography). Her pictures have been shown in numerous exhibitions. Among the most famous are the photos of the author Heinrich Böll protesting against NATO's plans to station new nuclear missiles in Mutlangen in the early 1980s and of the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann during a performance in Cologne, shortly before he was stripped of his East German citizenship. For over 30 years Klemm has been photographing life in East and West Germany; in 1999 her photo essay Unsere Jahre. Bilder aus Deutschland 1968-1998 (i.e. Our Years. Pictures from Germany 1968-1998) was published.

Unconventional portraits of celebrities

Künstlerporträts, her first volume of portraits, is a collection of some 200 black and white photos of authors, visual artists, directors, actors and musicians, compiled over four decades. The author Patricia Highsmith stands with her arms crossed in front of a painting depicting her as a young woman - and in which she has the same posture. The poet Friederike Mayröcker sits in her room in Vienna, surrounded by a huge stack of notes. Pop star Madonna gazes in childlike fascination at the catwalk in a fashion show in Paris; surrounded by people in dark clothes, the lady in white stands outs like a shining beacon. The artist Andy Warhol has placed himself in front of a huge portrait of Goethe in a museum, he looks at the photographer, the corners of his mouth turned down.

Photographs without director's instructions

Probably Warhol positioned himself in front of the portrait, for Barbara Klemm gives hardly any instructions. As the author Ingo Schulze relates in his foreword to the photo essay, “the lack of director's instructions” made him feel rather uncertain when Barbara Klemm took photos of him in East Berlin in 1998. Instead, she prowled slowly around her subject, who was standing in the Karl-Marx-Allee, with her Leica and her Canon, shot several photos and, in the end, she had what she wanted. “I try to give the person I'm dealing with the chance to behave in a way that he or she feels comfortable,” says the photographer in the Herner Feuilleton. Perhaps this is why her photos often appear so authentic.

Discretion, respect and empathy seem to be Klemm's outstanding attributes as a photographer. Thus portraits emerge in which it is clear that the subject trusts the photographer. As with Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The fact that he seems relatively small in the middle of his room is typical of Klemm's portraits, which often show much of the surroundings. She doesn't have to “get too close for comfort” to the persons she is portraying in order to show them in their true light. “I like to portray people with their surroundings, this shows part of their life, it has something to do with them and the way they are,” as Klemm said in the Herner Feuilleton. “For this you need the right distance just as you do in a conversation.”

No flashlight, no shots from the hip

Wilfried Wiegand, art historian and former features editor of the F.A.Z, defines the distinctive aspect of Klemm's pictures as follows: “She does not photograph with loud colours, but still relies on the comparatively quiet black and white. Barbara Klemm is a no-flashlight photographer, and this she is out of conviction. (…) Barbara Klemm avoids spectacular effects, and her pictures are developed with a minimum of layout. Composing her shots in such a way that one visual element immediately strikes the eye is not for her..(…) It is not uncommon for the actual subject to be positioned in the picture quite casually, as if it were merely of peripheral importance.

An eye trained by the art of painting

“The moment that you actually want to capture you don't get – because you can't work so fast,” explained Barbara Klemm in the TV magazine Kulturzeit. “You only get the second moment. But for the viewer it's the first.” She said that she owed her gift of observation to her parents, who were both painters. During the students' revolt of 1968, with which she sympathised, she made an important experience: although it's important to take a stance, as a photographer one has to remain an outside observer, otherwise the pictures will be unconvincing. Following this principle, she made numerous photo reportages – ranging from politicians' meetings to hippies, from the socialist “World Festival Games” to everyday life in Mexico or to nuns working in the fields in the German state of Hesse. She conveys in exemplary form a certain feeling for life and creates impressive contemporary documents. Barbara Klemm pursues an objective - as Christoph Stölzl writes in the photo essay Unsere Jahre: “Telling the story of her time as the story of our time, as the collective endeavours of humankind. With her photos she is creating a portrait of an epoch.”

Barbara Klemm: Künstlerporträts. Nicolai Verlag 2004, 250 S., 49,90 Euro, ISBN 3-89479-157-8 Barbara Klemm: Unsere Jahre. Bilder aus Deutschland 1968 – 1998; Klinkhardt & Biermann 1999, 288 Seiten, ISBN: 3781404226