The Shuttered Society

Art Photography in the GDR, 1949 – 1989

Ursula Arnold, Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Christian Borchert, Micha Brendel, Kurt Buchwald, Lutz Dammbeck, Klaus Elle, Arno Fischer, Thomas Florschuetz, Ernst Goldberg, Heinz Hähner-Springmühl, Matthias Hoch, Edmund Kesting, Jorg Knöfel, Fritz Kühn, Matthias Leupold, Ulrich Lindner, Karl Heinz Mai, Sven Marquardt, Roger Melis, Florian Merkel, Peter Oehlmann, Helga Paris, Manfred Paul, Richard Peter sen., Evelyn Richter, Jens Rötzsch, Rudolf Schäfer, Michael Scheffer, Erasmus Schröter, Gundula Schulze-Eldowy, Maria Sewcz, Ulrich Wüst

The Berlinische Galerie presents the first exhibition in the world to take a comprehensive look at art photography in the GDR. Key questions are: Was art photography ever free under authoritarian East German conditions? And how did art photography change over four decades? The museum shows works by 34 photographers who critically reflect social conditions: Ursula Arnold’s blunt descriptions of everyday life, Arno Fischer’s melancholic symbolism, Jens Rötzsch’s colourful metaphors of a society falling apart, and purely subjective, emotional compositions in the work of Thomas Florschuetz and Maria Sewcz. The positions selected convey the major currents of development of art photography in the GDR: montage and experimentation, documentary photography and social reportage, and the work of young photographers in the 1980s.