Vendredi 06 Mai 2016 12:40:42 par Annabelle Martella dans Expositions

There is no photography. There is always only the photograph which gazes back at the viewer. Sometimes with a careful, tentative and questioning look; sometimes with a brisk or hasty glance. But it always offers something: an invitation to brief conversations. The viewer always looks, and the photograph, full of curiosity, gazes back. As in 1966, when the German reportage photographer Robert Lebeck took a portrait of the former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer at his 90 th birthday celebration in Bonn. The image, published in the magazine „Kristall”, shows nothing more than the left eye of the aged chancellor. The rest is covered by the portly body of a stranger. But this eye was already enough. The magazine photo engaged the reader in a dialogue. What really moved Adenauer on this winter day, what he saw or said, was no longer important in this image. What was important was the encounter. The gaze,the eyes, the reflections: the vis-à- vis of seeing and being seen.

© stefan moses 'Peggy Guggenheim', Venedig 1973 / Courtesy Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST

Photographs of people are full of such encounters. At times it is the sitter flirting with the camera and the photographer, other times it is a dialogue with the self-image. Over 50 such photographic interactions from the studios of 25 photographers will be shown as of May 7, 2016 at the Galerie Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST. Under the title „Vis-à- vis“ the photographs will encourage dialogues – sometimes with another image; but always with their viewers. The burlesque self-reflections by Stefan Moses are a prime example. In the series „Self in Mirror“ from the early 1960s the Munich portrait photographer asked important German intellectuals, such as Theodor W. Adorno or Ernst Bloch, to sit in front of a discarded department store mirror. Using a self-timer the thinkers were asked to stage themselves. In this way unusual introspection took place in front of Moses’ camera - images which oscillate between amazement,
contemplation and great humor.

This ultimately narcissistic juxtaposition of the “I” and the self-image is also present in one of the works by the Austrian-American photographer Lillian Birnbaum. Her photo „Hanna and Mirror“ from 1992 shows a complex fragmentation of identity and the body. Birnbaum creates the exceptional portrait of the actress Hanna Schygulla through an interwoven composition of camera, wall and vanity mirror reflections. It is the fractured self that Birnbaum places into view – the deconstruction of our image of personality. A photo of a mirror by the Swiss photographer René Groebli is in contrast very different. His camera also looked at a large wall mirror, but, here, a double portrait looks back at the viewer. Behind the delicate face of Groebli’s former wife Rita, the viewer sees the reflected silhouette of Groebli himself. Here no stranger is looking at a stranger. The image, which was published in 1954 in the book The Eye of Love, shows the
vis-a- vis of two lovers.

However, not only reflections become counterparts in „Vis-à- vis“. Works by photographers such as Heinz Hajek-Halke, Herbert List or Max Scheler, search for companions, reference points or a complement in this exhibition. At times they find their counterpart in reflections of forms and poses, or simply in the eye of the viewer. No matter how long one looks at these black and white photographs; they always return one’s gaze.

Ralf Hanselle