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May 5, 2008
I know little about contemporary German photography apart from the work of Andreas Gursky and the landscape work of Michael Reisch. My impression is that photography in Germany is booming.
What I do know that in the 1920s and early ‘30s German photography was dominated by two distinct approaches to making images. The first is associated with the work and ideas of László Maholy-Nagy (1895-1946), championed unconventional forms and techniques, unexpected vantage points, and playful printing techniques to engender a fresh rapport with the visible world. The other, part of a movement called New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), emphasized rigorous and close observation, bringing a sharply focused, documentary quality to the photographic art. It included Albert Renger-Patzsch, August Sander, and Werner Manz.
And since then? The key figures among the later group are Bernd and Hilla Becher, who since 1959 have explored the forms of the built environment, including traditional German houses and, most famously, industrial structures, making hundreds of images of water towers, blast furnaces, and mining apparatus.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, large, steel storage tank, circa 1960s, silver gelatin print
I gather that there work has been been influential and so way can talk in terms of the Düsseldorf school ie., the so-called Becher School at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, (Blast Furnace) Neuves Maisons, Lorraine, France, 1971, silver gelatin print
Key figures in the Düsseldorf school that emphasis a clinical objectivity and large format cameras are Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte's land and urbanscapes, and Thomas Struth. There is also the more idiosyncratic work of Thomas Ruff.
The art context is painting's beleaguered position in a world increasingly dominated by film, and by photography in particular, whether the best painting aspires to the condition of photography or the best photography aspires to the condition of painting, or that photography hasn't really spelled the death of painting since art went mechanical.
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Gary a key figure here is Gerhard Richter who labored at an alternative to the German neoexpressionists—Lupertz, Penck, Immendorff, Baselitz—who still believed in painting as the pre-eminent visual art. Richter's response was the subordination of painting to photography.