Mercredi 05 Octobre 2016 12:05:22 par Hugues Garnier dans Expositions

Press release

New special exhibition in Alpine Museum
“Standpunkt. Jürgen Winkler 1951 – 2016”

Under the title ”Standpunkt. Jürgen Winkler 1951-2016”, the German Alpine Club (Deutscher Alpenverein/DAV) has dedicated a special exhibition to mountain photographer Jürgen Winkler. In a retrospective the Alpine Museum shows the oft distinguished work of Winkler, who is regarded as the prototype of the climbing and hiking photography collector. “With his shots of mountains and people alike, Jürgen Winkler wrote alpine cultural history” explains Friederike Kaiser, Culture Departmental Manager of the German Alpine Club. “Numerous subjects of his photographs have become true mountaineering icons.” Since the early 1960s the photographer has accompanied alpinism with his camera: in the Alps as well as on over one hundred trekking trips to mountains around the world. This first retrospective of his oeuvre forges a link between the black-and-white shots of the 1950s and his most recent works taken with a digital camera. Further focal points show portraits of people in the Himalayas and the Andes, nature still-lifes and the multi-faceted “other images” of the touristic alpine world. The exhibition is on display in the Alpine Museum on the Praterinsel from 21st July 2016 until 5th February 2017.

Between the poles of mountaineering and photography
“Mountaineering and photography don’t make good bedfellows”, observes Winkler. “In general I have to decide whether to do one or the other”. He learnt both: born in 1940, Jürgen Winkler is a trained photographer and certified mountain guide. He gained recognition in the 1960s, above all thanks to his black-and-white photographs. “Winkler’s black-and-white photography thrives on graphics, lines and surfaces, light and shadow”, explains Sabine Wimmer, curator of the exhibition. “Winkler often found worthwhile subjects in that place where contrasts come into conflict, ideally in snow-capped mountain ranges or on glacial terrain.” Winkler shows the people who he meets as visitors in an overwhelming natural world, hiking and climbing, with crampons, ice axes, skis. “Even his action photographs are meticulously composed”, says Axel Klemmer, exhibition curator. “Jürgen Winkler plays with the tension between extreme proximity and distance, clarity and soft focus.”

The other side of the mountains
In the early 1980s, Winkler began to document the banal everyday life in populated mountain ranges. The “other images” of these living spaces and transit areas of the economic and recreation parks in the Alps are often met with incomprehension by fans of his “beautiful” mountain shots. Yet Winkler acts as a documentalist, he analyses and doesn’t denounce or judge.
Winkler has been taking photographs with a digital camera since 2012. He doesn’t search for a subject, he finds it very often in his immediate vicinity, the foothills of the Alps between the Isar and Loisach rivers. “It is photography in the purest sense of the word”, exclaims Axel Klemmer. “Drawing with light, unencumbered by complicated logistics, physical exertion or the dangers of mountaineering.”

© Jürgen Winkler. Normgerechte Verbauung mit Perspektive, 1998




© Jürgen Winkler. Ama Dablam mit Chörten, Nepal, 1992




© Jürgen Winkler. Biancograt, Piz Bernina, 1969