'Photography Behind the Berlin Wall' at UH Galleries

Monday, 05 November 2007 23:05

Hatfield, UK - While on a visit to the exhibition Art of the GDR in Berlin in 2003, Matthew Shaul, Curator at the University of Hertfordshire Galleries discovered amongst the hackneyed, ideological offerings from East Germany’s artistic past, a beautiful and almost entirely unknown chapter in the history post-war European photography. On exhibition November 9 - December 21, 2007.

As he puts it: ‘Most of the exhibition predictably comprised awful communist inspired paintings of banner waving peasants and ecstatic tractor drivers. The last room however, was devoted to a group of photographers whose work quite literally took my breath away. Easily comparable with the work of artists such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Miller or Eve Arnold, these photographers were completely unknown outside Eastern Germany. I was astonished that such a rich, photographic heritage could have remained undiscovered for so long and returned to the UK with a determination to bring these photographs to a wider international public’.

November 2007 sees the resulting exhibition Do Not Refreeze - Photography Behind the Berlin Wall (which is in every way comparable to what visitors might expect to see at the major London museums) arrives in Hatfield and features Arno Fischer, Sybille Bergman, Helga Paris, Evelyn Richter, Maria Sewcz, Erasmus Schroeter, Gundula Schulze, Ulrich Wüst and Ursula Arnold.

Disparate in background and experience, the nine participating artists use an unforgiving documentary aesthetic to convey both the harsh realities and remarkable richness of life behind the Iron Curtain . These stunning images, convey a glimpse of day-to-day life and evoke the claustrophobia, rage, envy and ideological pomp of the communist era, as well as the unexpected personal warmth, tenderness and exoticism to be found throughout the eastern bloc.

Sticking closely to the mantra of ‘realism’ - the state directed creed which defined what was artistically acceptable - these photographers circumnavigated a rigid system of censorship and the omnipresent secret police to produce the most insightful and openly socially critical visual arts output in East Germany’s forty year history.

Had they been painters, sculptors, authors or playwrights, these photographers would have been arrested or imprisoned for their brazen portrayals of the underbelly of the socialist experiment. Because photography was not considered by the East German authorities to be ‘art’ they were, incredibly, not only able to work but sometimes also to publish and exhibit in a police state where by some reckonings there was one informer for every five members of the general populace.

The accompanying fully illustrated catalogue priced £14.95 (112pp) examines the themes of censorship and individual creative freedom, photography’s consistently undervalued status as a contemporary art form and the redefinition of yesterday’s photojournalism as today’s contemporary art. Visit University of Hertfordshire Galleries, Art and Design Gallery, College Lane, Hatfield AL10 9AB T: +44 1707 285376 F: + 44 1707 285312 E: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and www.go.herts.ac.uk/uhgalleries