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The Week in Germany: Culture August 25, 2006 Darkroom Dreams: Timeless Trendsetting, Early Experiments in Color and an Epic Construction Project The time is now to catch three exhibits in Berlin showcasing the very different photographic works of Martin Munkácsi, László Moholy-Nagy and Roland Horn. Hungarian-born Munkácsi, who spent six years in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1934, is considered by many as the premier pioneer of modern photojournalism. He depicted athletes in action and brought fashion photography outdoors, contributing to a new image of independent, urban womanhood in the process. The Martin-Gropius-Bau - named after the seminal Bauhaus design school director and architect who shaped the Chicago skyline - is showcasing Munkácsi's work in a retrospective of more than 350 photographs shot from 1923 to 1963 in Hungary, Berlin and the United States, including 300 original prints. The exhibit runs through November 6. Lost and found Many of these photographs were never republished and are largely unknown today. "The search lasted for years," an online summary of the Munkácsi retrospective states. "Major American museums refused the donation of the Munkácsi archive after his death in 1963," it adds. "His pictures and negatives were scattered all over the world, and a large part of the work he left behind was lost. Only the Ullstein Archive in Berlin and the F.C. Gundlach Collection in Hamburg still possesses complete portfolios of his life's work from the Hungarian, German and American phases." In Germany, his photographs were published in the mass-circulation Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung newspaper and fashion magazines such as Die Dame (The Lady). In the United States, his work appeared in Life, Harper's Bazaar and the Ladies' Home Journal, for which he produced the "How America Lives" series from 1940-46, which featured real people from all walks of life. He also took unusual portraits of Hollywood stars such as Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Leslie Howard, Jane Russell and Marlene Dietrich. Color photography from a Bauhaus legend Munkácsi was among a wave of Hungarian photographers and artists drawn to prewar Berlin. He arrived there in 1928, the same year as László Moholy-Nagy. They were followed in 1931 by Ernö Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa. Nagy began experimenting with color photography in about 1934. A constructivist and Bauhaus master, his own exile from Nazi Germany ultimately took him - like Gropius - to the New Bauhaus in Chicago. While his earlier black-and-white photographic works have been published in book form, the exhibition "Color in Transparency: László Moholy-Nagy - Photographic Experiments in Color" showcases 55 works from 1934 to 1946 and collates them for the first time in a catalog. On view at the Bauhaus-Archiv design museum through September 4, this retrospective includes color photographs, abstract compositions, portraits, advertisements, cityscapes and studies from the design school in Chicago. Witness to a mammoth structure of glass and steel taking shape Fast-forward to the present to take in a series of giant photographic prints of Berlin's new train station depicted as a monumental work-in-progress. German photographer Roland Horn, born in 1964, spent eight years photographing Europe's biggest railway hub. Some 100 images taken from 1999 to 2006 are on display until September 12 at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin. They portray the train station while under construction, including views
that will no longer be visible once it is complete. The prints provide
remarkable insights into the construction process, as well as the risks
taken by the brave workers who built the starkly stunning web of steel
and glass straddling the station. Links: |
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