Peter Keetman is regarded as a key innovator of German post-war photography. His work, which FOTOHOF is presenting for the first time in Austria in a broad cross-section, is closely associated with the “Fotoform” group, a loose association of young photographers in Germany at the end of the 1940s who focused on the creative element in photography.
Many of Peter Keetman’s “fotoform” subjects were found en passant, but were then reworked in long series of physical experiments. Rarely did he generate images artificially, such as the series of his oscillating figures.
Keetman’s photography is defined by its production process: it is not for nothing that there is an anecdote for every photograph, that every picture is given its technical genesis in conversation – “fotoform” as a formula means nothing more than ordering a seen chaos by choosing the narrowest possible detail. Almost all of Peter Keetman’s works have gone through aesthetic reduction and maturation processes: from the ‘impression’ just seen (according to Cartier-Breesson’s “decisive moment”) to the choice of suitable means of reproduction for design (according to Laszlo and Lucia Moholy-Nagy’s “production-reproduction”) to the final elaboration, which also believes it has free and autonomous control over its means (according to Otto Steinert’s definition of “subjective photography”).
from: Michael Mauracher/Rolf Sachsse, FOTOHOF Info, issue 3/1988