Vintage Portraits

Cultural Figures of the '70s / '80s

Ute Schendel

For this exhibition, photographer Ute Schendel selected a series of vintage prints from the 1970s and 1980s, portraits of prominent figures from the world of theatre, film, and literature with whom she was or continues to be in close contact.

Back then, Schendel experimented with the sulphur toning technique on Agfa P90 paper. This painterly effect lent her ‘realistic’ portraits expressive force. After a series of experiments, she left it at that and turned her entire attention to documentary photography. The vintage print portraits remained in the photographer's studio archive in Basel; she didn’t rediscover them until 2019. They will be exhibited for the first time in the framework of EMOP Berlin.

Large-format sulphur toning prints of Fernando Arabal, Mauricio Kagel, Walter Stöhrer, Samuel Beckett, Peter Kurzeck, Ezra Gerhard, and George Tabori are on view. These images are complemented by black-and-white silver gelatin portraits of Gisèle Freund, Heiner Müller, Einar Schleef, Joanna Jones, and Herbert Achternbusch, among others.