Dieter Hacker – political photography (1974–1981)

Blackbox #5

Dieter Hacker

In the 1970s, the artist Dieter Hacker (born 1942), chiefly known as a painter today, experimented heavily with amateur photography as an artistic and political medium. Together with Andreas Seltzer, he published the magazine Volksfoto. Zeitung für Fotografie (People’s Photo. Newspaper for Photography). A total of six issues were published, accompanied by exhibitions in which the analogue photos that Hacker received from various private individuals were brought together to form large-scale interactive installations. These works addressed the relationship between privacy and the public sphere, the individual and mass society, art and refuse. Parallel to these “people’s photos,” Hacker also created his own photographs, photo series, and installations that commented on theories of photographic history and the philistine everyday reality of West German life.

Now, the Bröhan Museum honors Hacker’s photographic work with a solo show—because regardless of whether we’re talking about “people’s art” or social media, in the age of Facebook and Instagram, it’s more relevant than ever to question both the power or impotence of a photograph in the flood of media images and photography itself as an instrument of self-staging.