For ancient India, 5,000 years ago to be specific, the world was one big family. As the Sanskrit adage goes, Udaracharitanam tu Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. The Germans, it seems, are not far behind. For a generation of contemporary German lensmen born between 1955 and 1971 to be precise, it is Die Welt Als Ganzes. Translated into English, the phrase means ‘The World as One.’ A fitting title for the German Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Relations) sponsored exhibition at the Coomaraswamy Hall, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya.
Displaying a representative sample of professional documentary photography in colour executed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the independently researched oeuvre of 19 German photographers is grouped under 17 sections, underlining such themes as the effects of German reunification, the withdrawal of the Russian Army from Germany (Frank Muller’s three silver bromide prints of Russians and forgotten artefacts of evacuated Russian barracks) and the pace of economic and social change in the Far East (Enno Kapitza’s Japan). Clearly, there is an intimate relationship between our environment and us.
All of the photographers received formal training in Essen, Bielefeld, Dortmund, Munich and Leipzig. Apparently, colour supplements in serious newspapers enjoyed a boom while the photographers were learning the possibilities and limitations of ‘pictorial journalism’ at their different places of study. A certain synergy developed between the art directors of the magazine belonging to the Süddeutsche Zeitung and this new generation of photographers. A result of their collaboration is an impressive book titled ‘Contemporary German Photography’.
The eight-year-old travelling exhibition and its accompanying 144-page colour catalogue relate the history of this new visual beginning in exemplary detail. Julia Sorgel’s work Rasborka (‘Test of Strength’) spotlights German immigrants from Kazakhstan in a narrative of the arduous struggle at the end of the Cold War; Jitka Hanzlova presents a personal odyssey. She revisited for five years from 1990, the Bohemian village where she was born, to capture intimate glimpses of children at play and grizzled war veterans.
Personal roots also characterise the work of Ingo Taubhorn who photographed his own Westphalian family in the Berlin milieu he now lives in.
Martin Fengel documents the life of a youth, Andi Bohl and the tangled lines of telecommunications in two sets of photos; yet another photographer presents in a series of large portraits, close-ups of the ravaged faces of women drug addicts. Corinna Wichman traces the journey of an imaginary character called ‘K’ up the Elbe River to Hamburg, Dresden and Dessau.
The strange landscapes (juxtaposing the classical and the post-industrial) of Dessau were documented by Axel Boesten and Kai Olaf Hesse over a two- year period.
