This exhibition is less intended to provide a representative cross-section of artistic work with the medium of photography in Berlin than to include works by several striking individual personalities.
Klaus-Peter Voutta’s portrait photography shows people close to him in series of pictures, each seeking different nuances and approaches. Ulla Kelm’s self-portraits and body images, in which she works with motion blur, strong contrast and high detail, seem more direct in their expression. Friedhelm Denkeler is the pioneer of a photography of very own feelings in Berlin that is distinctly separate from documentary approaches; he places relationships and lack of relationships, sexuality and the image of women as well as his relationship to them and the problems they pose to him at the center of his photographic work. Manfred-Michael Sackmann’s pictures of fringe areas such as beauty pageants or bodybuilding events also often have to do with female sexuality, but he is the only one of the group to consistently pursue a journalistic approach. Christa Mayer works in a completely different area of society and also with different photographic means, photographing long-term patients at the psychiatric clinic where she works as a psychologist; in contrast to other psychiatric images, her photos are calm, characterized by silence and seclusion, and the gazes of those portrayed point to the existence of other, inner realities. Rolf Ulrich Schaefer’s media-reflexive works, which relate to photography itself, unfold their effect in the space between aesthetic appeal and conceptual thoughtfulness, always with the aim of challenging the viewer to productive collaboration.
from: Rolf Ulrich Schaefer, FOTOHOF Info, issue 1/1985