Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

"Moments of individual or collective epiphany are preserved in his best photographs" – said Wolfgang Kemp of this photographer in 1991.

That is of course a large claim but it captures what is essential about Stefan Moses’s art: an ability to get people to reveal themselves in his photographs, leaving behind the role they play in public, in society, and showing something of their selves. For that Stefan Moses found unusual forms of staging, which left far behind the stiff iconography of great beings petrified in dignity.

Forest Images

'Käthe Kruse'

He transported Germany’s poets, thinkers, and politicians to woods, getting them to walk between trees and emerge out of bushes. Ex-Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, liberated from all political constraints, is shown surrounded by tender young tree shoots, and Herbert Wehner, the primal rock of the Social Democratic Party, appears as gnarled and unchangeable as the tree trunk on which he is sitting. Käthe Kruse, the ageing puppet artist, seems a tender wood fairy. No-one was able to escape the fairytale-like impact of nature.

Oneself in the Mirror

In the Oneself in the Mirror series the photographer left his celebrated protagonists – boxing legend Max Schmeling, writer Erich Kästner, philosopher Ernst Bloch, or literary scholar Hans Mayer -- to take pictures of themselves. These models were reflected in a mirror from the C&A clothing store and photographed their alter ego using a delayed- action shutter-release.

'Bloch / Meyer'

Stefan Moses recorded their spontaneous curiosity, amazement, or concentration with a second camera, elucidating in his shot the camera position, the spatial situation, and the placing of both subject and the mirror. This unusual method where self-representation changes into self-reflection brought a new element into portrait photography.

Masks

Following his awareness that no-one really wants to be recognized, Stefan Moses gave artists about 5 minutes in which to disguise themselves for his series Masks. Then he photographed them with his camera. Cartoonist Saul Steinberg stuck his finger as a nose through the middle of a paper-plate face.

'Otto Dix'

Painter Jörg Immendorff became a one-eyed cyclops, deploying a painted medical face-mask. His colleague Otto Dix looked penetratingly through the handles of upturned scissors. In their performances the artists revealed themselves to be quick-change artists of genius, creating in their masks and disguises amazingly expressive abbreviations of their own work.

In these series of images the concept and the live photograph unite to create an individual visual language as is seldom the case.

Since 1995 Munich’s Stadtmuseum has owned Stefan Moses’ photographic collection with around 20,000 original prints. Only a fraction of the exhibition (around 220 images) are being exhibited at Goethe-Institutes worldwide. And yet this has become a comprehensive exhibition whose ten sections present a visual chronicle of Germany from the beginnings of the new Federal Republic up to the present day.

Biography

'Election campaign       party'

Stefan Moses (born in 1928 in Liegnitz/Silesia) started his career in 1943 with Grete Bodlée in Breslau, working there with a Leica for the first time. After the war he first became a theatre photographer at the Nationaltheater in Weimar and then for about six weeks a photographer in the DEFA film studios at Potsdam-Babelsberg In 1950, he settled in Munich in 1950 and became a photo-journalist who sees the world as a stage. Spontaneous improvised theatre, utilizing just a few elements to produce a Brechtian setting, is one model for his visual inventiveness.

Images of Society

The early work from the fifties is not characteristic of what was to come later. Ghostly street scenes from Budapest in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. Or the image of a Spanish saleswoman in a shop for devotional objects (Sevilla, 1954) whose sensuous body defies the ascetic images of saints as flesh become contradiction.

'Sheperd'

In this picture the saleswoman and her shop are interrelated, and the photographic statement depends on interplay between person, job, and surroundings. In the sixties Stefan Moses left behind that approach when he moved across the Federal Republic, in the tradition of travelling photographers, and developed a new kind of typological portrait. Women gymnastics teachers and tram conductors (Cologne 1963) or street-sweepers (Berlin 1964) pose there in front of an enormous cloth as if on stage as energetic stars of their own lives.

The light-grey cloth was a brilliant idea as is documented in photo-sequences of the work before the actual portraits were taken. This made spontaneous improvisation possible. When thrown over a wire-netting fence, a concrete wall, or an excavator shovel, this cloth neutralized any kind of background. The person to be portrayed was asked to pose. "I’m supposed to stand there?" – was the question to be read in faces. Left to themselves, and what is happening internally, there then occurred what should happen in any good theatre: the person’s uniqueness became apparent, whether in the form of shyness, self-assertion, joy in life, or natural wit.

The cloth was also used in 1989/90 when Stefan Moses was commissioned by the Berlin-based German Historical Museum to set off once again – together with his wife, Else Bechteler, herself a well-known weaver -- to produce the East German Portraits cycle, creating a photographic record of East Germans in the period after the Wall came down. In the exhibition the photographs of people from East and West Germany hang opposite one another. In front of the grey cloth the territorial and ideological frontiers between, say, Women packing Rollmops in Büsum (West, 1963) and Women processing Fish at Warnemünde (East, 1990) vanish.

In all phases of his career this photographer has mainly been interested in portraits. Many individual portraits – of politicians and philosophers, metal worker and street-workers, writers and actors, slaughterers and cooks – add up in their diversity to constitute a portrait of German society. Nevertheless no political declaration can be attributed to these photographs, profoundly humanitarian though they may be. Their unconditioned closeness to human beings make these black-and-white shots particularly touching in an age of digital aesthetics.

In 2008 the exhibition will tour to: Guayaquil (February) Rabat/Casablanca (February until April) Guadalajara (April/Mai) Alexandria (May until June) Monterrey (June) Beirut (July) Washington (September). For further information please ask your local Goethe-Institut. The exhibition catalogue is published by Schirmer/Mosel: c. 320 pp and 220 pictures in duotone, 68 euros.