Birgit Kleber - Order and Obsession

Portraits in Series

Birgit Kleber

Birgit Kleber looks people squarely in the face, sometimes for minutes on end. And they look back: directly, intensely. It’s a fascinating, immovable intensity of the gaze. Sometimes those being photographed keep their eyes closed, or remain hidden behind strange glasses. Under the title Camouflage, men of varying ages are united here in an unusual experiment or study of human physiognomy.
Portraits record the moment; they can also, when approached as a series over years as with the series EMIL and CLARA, also become a temporal document of a process of change. The system chosen here forms a good starting point for comparative viewing.
It’s often a highly individual facial expression that the photographer captures; characterizing a person does not, however, necessarily entail looking him or her in the face—or preferably the eyes—in certain cases, it can also work when only the back of the head is visible, as Kleber shows us in the evocative work EVA.
(M. Harder)