Photography at the Museum Ludwig—Two Exhibitions June 28–October 5, 2014 Opening: June 27, Press Reception: June 26
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Contact: Anne Niermann / Leonie Pfennig Press and Public Relations Tel. +49 (0)221 221 - 23491 or +49 (0)221 221 - 23003 [email protected] [email protected] Photography at the Museum Ludwig—Two Exhibitions June 28–October 5, 2014 Opening: June 27, Press reception: June 26 In June 2014 the Museum Ludwig will open two exhibitions that focus on its rich collection of photography. The exhibitions approach the collection from two different temporal perspectives. One looks at the beginnings of photography, when Erich Stenger attempted to devote a museum exclusively to the technical medium. The other show turns to the 1970s, when photography was discovered as art and as a theoretical subject. For both exhibitions, Roland Barthes’s essay “Camera Lucida” provides an occasion to reexamine, in the twenty-first century, photography’s relationship to the institution of the (art) museum. As curator of contemporary art, Dr. Barbara Engelbach is in charge of photography from 1960 to the present. She has curated a series of monographic photography exhibitions on the work of exponents such as Ed Ruscha, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Jochen Lempert, and Hugo Schmölz. For the show What does the jellyfish want? Artists & Photographs she examined the collection’s holdings of photography from 1960 onward and published a catalogue raisonné. Since the fall of 2013 Dr. Miriam Halwani has been in charge of the Photographic Collection holdings dating from the medium’s beginning to 1960. Her dissertation explored the historiography of photography, its myths and role models, including the collector Erich Stenger. In Berlin she curated the show Berliner Photographie 1921 at the Museum of Photography and the exhibition Lothar Wolleh: Joseph Beuys im Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1971 at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, where she was also co-curator of Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good. The Museum of Photography: A Revision June 28–October 5, 2014 For decades a specter has haunted podium discussions, magazines, and feuilletons: the museum of photography. “We need it,” say advocates; “really?” counter opponents. According to Roland Barthes, photography is tamed when it is shown in the places and ways in which one typically exhibits art: in a museum, in a frame, or neat and tidy in a passe-partout. The collector Erich Stenger (1878–1958) never regarded photographs as art but, rather, as evidence of technology. His vision for their presentation, however, was an institutional one. Beginning in the 1920s he campaigned for a (technical) museum of photography, for which he collected and developed an organizational plan. For the taxonomist Stenger, frames and vitrines were favored exhibition furnishings. Today, his extensive collection is part of the Agfa Collection and thus an important part of the Photographic Collection of the Museum Ludwig—in other words, of an art museum. But how does one deal with this collection in an art museum? Since the early twentieth century, parts of Stenger’s Collection have appeared in exhibitions focused on a variety of issues. At the Museum Ludwig these have included Facts, Silber und Salz, An den süßen Ufern Asiens (On the Sweet Shores of Asia), and many others. The present exhibition concentrates on and reevaluates Stenger’s own collection concept. Ultimately, museums and archives are now the subject of heated debates and intensive self- reflection. They give shape to and regulate cultural memory. They influence our perception of the past and present, as does photography in the museum in particular. When the Stenger Collection was declared a national treasure in 2005 this function became virtually official. This is reason enough to take stock of it, and to examine the criteria according to which its works were collected and how one would like to approach these objects in a museum today. Curator: Miriam Halwani Intractable and Untamed: Documentary Photography around 1979 June 28–October 5, 2014 In 1979, in his manuscript “Camera Lucida,” Roland Barthes differentiated between two ways of approaching photography: by taming it through aesthetic categories such as authorship, oeuvre, and genre, or by permitting its madness, based in the “awakening of intractable reality” in photography. Around twenty years later documenta 10 and documenta 11, in 1997 and 2001, demonstrated that these two ways of viewing photography—as art or as an image of reality—need not contradict one another. On the contrary, precisely the photograph as a document, Okwui Enwezor tells us, is capable of forging a new relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Today—thirty-five years after the publication of Barthes’s essay “Camera Lucida”—the exhibition Intractable and Untamed presents documentary photographs created around 1979, with the aim of investigating their aesthetic and ethical, performative and political connections to “intractable reality.” The year 1979 is associated above all with a period of radical social change and crises, which made the documentary approach artistically significant. Artists and photographers observed and documented the global transformation over extended periods of time, by and large, where they lived. To a degree, this resulted in large assortments of photographs. Hence the exhibition does not focus on the individual image. Rather, the show presents one photo series by each of the fifteen photographers and artists selected, supplemented by loans that complement the collection in an exemplary fashion. The documentary approach is revealed not only in the photographs themselves but can also be seen in their use. The exhibition therefore poses each of the photo series five questions: when, where, and by whom were the photos made; who commissioned them; to whom are they addressed; where and how were they first published? And which options for approaching photography can we identify today? Curator: Barbara Engelbach .