On 29 January 2023, Karla Nieraad and curator Dr Raimund Kast from Ulm City Hall, together with Silke Frigge, managing director of laif, opened the exhibition ‘40 Years of laif – 40 Positions of Documentary Photography’ in the presence of numerous guests and laif photographers Peter Bialobrzeski (curator), Frieder Blickle, Günter Beer, Manfred Linke and Berthold Steinhilber, opened the exhibition ‘40 Years of laif – 40 Positions in Documentary Photography’. This is the second stop for the exhibition after Cologne.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Cologne-based photo agency laif, the exhibition presents 40 examples of documentary and journalistic photography from 1981 to 2021.
About the exhibition
The photographers selected by curator Peter Bialobrzeski, together with Peter Bitzer and Manfred Linke, reflect on the world in their work through its conflicts and fault lines, but also show how art and solidarity connect people. In addition, the works reflect the aesthetic development of documentary photography from the 1980s to the present day. The presentation, developed by Berlin-based designer Sarah Fricke, brings 40 years of contemporary history to life.
“While the photographers of the early days still covered protests against nuclear power, armament and airport expansions in a classic style, using black and white and staying very close to the action, colour photography came to the fore in the 1990s, in line with the technical reproduction capabilities of the press,” says Peter Bialobrzeski.
The exhibition, arranged chronologically, opens with works by two co-founders of the agency, Manfred Linke and Günter Beer, followed by artistic documentary image-text works on people at the Berlin Wall by Bettina Flitner (1990). In her work ‘Surface Tension,’ Katharina Bosse often portrays women around the world (1997), while Michael Lange presents an experimental work about Los Angeles, photographed on black-and-white Polaroid slide film, which can be read as an homage to ‘film noir’ (1999).
In ‘The Third Day’ (2012), Henrik Spohler documents in a cool, detached manner and with high visual quality how the agricultural industry grows food worldwide today. Sandra Hoyn visits a brothel in Bangladesh and takes an interest in the fate of the women and girls there (2015). In the end, the circle closes and the photographers turn their gaze back to Germany. Hannes Jung delivers a reportage on the New Right with an almost demagogic effect (2017), while Andreas Herzau presents his long-term work on Chancellor Merkel in subjectively combined image excerpts for the first time in its entirety as a book in 2018. In 2019, David Klammer becomes a permanent chronicler of the resistance against the deforestation of the Hambach Forest. Finally, in 2020, the young Ingmar Björn Nolting travels across Germany and creates a unique, rightly multi-award-winning testimony to the Corona crisis. The series concludes in 2021 with the flood disaster in the west of the country.
‘The positions are all assigned to a year between the founding of laif in 1981 and today. They were either created, prominently published, exhibited or won an important prize in the respective year. They represent what the agency stands for and at the same time reflect the diversity and development of documentary and journalistic photography from 1981 to 2021,’ explains laif managing director Silke Frigge.
On display are photo series by:
Christian Als, Christoph Bangert, Theodor Barth, Günter Beer, Regina Bermes, Jürgen Bindrim, Peter Bialobrzeski, Jan-Peter Boening, Katharina Bosse, James Whitlow Delano, Barbara Dombrowski, Stephan Elleringmann, Norbert Enker, Maria Feck, Bettina Flitner, Peter Granser, Jan Grarup, Andreas Herzau, James Hill, Sandra Hoyn, Britta Jaschinski, Hannes Jung, David Klammer, Vincent Kohlbecher, Axel Krause, Dirk Krüll, Michael Lange, Paul Langrock, Frederic Lezmi, Manfred Linke, Kai Löffelbein, André Lützen, Ingmar Björn Nolting, Helena Schätzle, Henrik Spohler, Berthold Steinhilber, Andreas Teichmann, Wolfgang Volz, Gordon Welters and Michael Wolf.
laif was founded in 1981 as a collective by four photographers, Günter Beer, Jürgen Bindrim, Manfred Linke and Guenay Ulutuncok, in Cologne’s Südstadt district. With the arrival of Peter Bitzer shortly afterwards, the collective became more professional and was transformed into an agency, ensuring laif’s continued existence. The laif photo agency now represents more than 400 photographers worldwide, including numerous World Press and Pulitzer Prize winners. It also represents more than 40 international partner agencies in German-speaking countries, including the publishing syndicate of the New York Times and the Société du Figaro. In order to continue working independently of external interests, laif photographers have set up a cooperative, which has been the new owner of the photo agency since 1 July 2022.
The exhibition catalogue, with an introduction by Anna Gripp, photographer and editor-in-chief of Photonews, is available for €14.90 or €19.90 with a decorative slipcase.
Accompanying programme
Guided tours of the exhibition with Dr Raimund Kast on
Thursday, 2 March 2023, 6 p.m. and
Sunday, 23 April 2023, 11.30 a.m.
Ticket €3.50.