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Weekly UpdatesDo Not Refreeze: Photography Behind the Berlin Wall
German Embassy
London
September 17, 2008-January 17, 2009
First shown at Manchester's Cornerhouse in 2007, "Do Not Refreeze: Photography Behind the Berlin Wall" found its final exhibition at the German Embassy in London's Belgrave Square. A discreet brass plaque identified the location of the show in the white-stuccoed elegance of the Ambassador's Residence.
The bureaucratic formality of the institutional setting provided an apt framework for an exhibition of photography produced in the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to the 1990s. Two hundred images were used in the original touring show, from six photographers: Arno Fischer, his wife Sibylle Bergemann, and another four female photographers Evelyn Richter, Helga Paris, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, and Ursula Arnold. Curator Matthew Shaul was motivated to organize the show after seeing "Kunst der DDR" in Berlin (2003) where the photography dramatically stood out; black-and-white and documentary in style, it spoke an alternative visual language to that of the banal "banner-waving peasants" who populated the state-sponsored painting from the same period. As an unflinching glimpse of life behind the Iron Curtain, the photographs Shaul went on to gather for "Do Not Refreeze" revealed a community of photographers who had been "frozen out" of the history of European photography. Previously assumed to be the inevitable product of the aesthetic strictures of the totalitarian regime under which they worked, their overlooked practice was exposed here as a "missing link" in that story.
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When I visited, participating photographer Evelyn Richter was in conversation with Shaul, part of an event that marked the exhibition's end. Offering insight into the realities of her working life, she expressed belief in the continued validity of the documentary photography that illuminated the show's importance. Referencing seeing the 1955 exhibition of Edward Steichen's "Family of Man" in West Berlin before the construction of the city's wall, she emphasized her commitment to the genre's political and humanist principles and her ongoing pursuit of what she called "exact seeing"--a process of thoughtful observation through which sensitivities to the realities of human experience could be communicated, providing the viewer with the means to read or decode the photographic image.
In a propaganda-saturated visual culture, Richter and her peers maintained a belief in the honesty of the documentary photograph at a time when this faith was questioned in the West. Throughout this show that faith was in evidence--from the gray geometric uniformity of the urban landscape in Richter's Magdeburg from 1968 to Schulze Eldowy's ten-year serial portrait of the dispossessed woman "Tamerlan" (1978-87) through homelessness, ill health and death, to the decaying streets of Paris's "Halle: Houses and Faces" ("Halle: Hauser und Gesichter," 1983-85). Everyday East Germany was captured in unsentimental detail and continued the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Dorothea Lange.
There was no vision of a communist Utopia here, just an uncompromising view of socialist life, only possible because cultural policy refused to recognize photography as an autonomous art, allowing photographers a curious freedom. Unquestionably realistic, the photograph was taken at face value, and its adherence to the party line on Realism as the preferred aesthetic style meant there was little room to question the medium's potential to bend meaning or subvert that "truth."
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As a result, photographers produced charged imagery that often slipped under the watchful gaze of state censorship. Although the decaying buildings of Paris's "Halle" series originally provoked reaction because they denied the Utopian ideal of the socialist city, pointed political comment went undetected--the exposed snow-covered rafters of a dilapidated Jugendstil building was not interpreted as a direct criticism of the policy of allowing historic buildings to decay in order to justify their demolition. Similarly, Schulze Eldowy's portraits of the decline of the disenfranchised Tamerlan were deemed suitable for exhibition. Party functionaries sent to "take the edge off" her work commented on the series' power, and ended up removing different images--one nude, one dead person, and one fat person. Visually illiterate, they could not read the modernist language or its complex metaphor, and as Schulze Eldowy commented in Pamela Meyer-Arndt's film Just An Ordinary Life (2006), shown as part of the exhibition's closing event, "the really subversive pictures stayed on the wall."
Perhaps this was best demonstrated in Richter's Eingang zum Pflegeheim, Leipzig (Entrance to the Nursing Home, Leipzig, 1986). It was in the documentation of everyday reality that the most incisive criticism could be made. A hospital bed is photographed against faded wallpaper and beneath a propaganda print of Lenin in insurgent pose; his heroic physicality contrasts sharply with the pathos and human vulnerability suggested by the crumpled sheets of the empty bed below. Reality and representation are juxtaposed, opening up a gap that is marked in Richter's prints by her inclusion of a black border around the image--a border that marks the limits of the document's "truth." Introducing an ambiguity that both emphasizes the need for a truthful telling of the period's story and its codification, the show's exacting vision of life in the GDR drew attention to photography's ability to bend meaning and place its viewer in a politicized relationship with its careful framing of the world.
HARRIET RICHES, PhD, is Lecturer in Visual Culture & the History of Art at Middlesex University in London.
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