Arno Fischer: Eine Reise (A Journey) Cat. Schloss Kummerow

by Hamelin, Candice M.

• ISBN13: 9783864423864
• ISBN10: 3864423864
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-03-01
• Publisher: Snoeck Publishing Company

Summary

Arno Fischer (1927– 2011) holds an important place in the history of German photography of the 20th century. During his career he was working across the photographic genres: he shot fashion models on the streets of Eastern European cities as well as ordinary citizens and their everyday lives in the Eastern Bloc. He travelled to Equatorial Guinea, India, the Soviet Union and the United States with his camera in hand. When not traversing the streets Fischer was an active member of DIREKT, a group founded in East Berlin in 1965, which significantly influenced the diversification of East Germany’ s visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Together with his wife, the photographer Sibylle Bergemann, Arno Fischer also maintained contacts with international photographers. Colleagues as Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and René Burri were always happy to visit them in their apartment on Schiffbauerdamm. As a lecturer, Fischer also mentored students, first at the Hochschule fü r Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and later, after the fall of the Wall, at the Ostkreuzschule fü r Fotografie und Gestaltung.

Author Biography

Candice M. Hamelin received her PhD in History of Art from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is an Associate Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universita¨ t Berlin and prepared this exhibition on East German photographer Arno Fischer. She is also writing a monograph on the ways in which East German photographers circulated their work in the German Democratic Republic. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the University of Michigan’ s Institute for the Humanities Fellowshipas well as a Berlin Program postdoctoral fellowship. Arno Fischer (1927– 2011) was a German photographer and university teacher. He was once asked whether in the wake of his experience with “ Situation Berlin” he was ever tempted to try and escape from East Germany, but while he sometimes found the country’ s bureaucratic constraints limiting, he was generally accepting of the situation in which he found himself. His work for “ Sibylle” gave him freedom to develop his own ideas on fashion photography while status as a distinguished photo-journalist gave him excellent travel entitlements: so he take a set of Marlene Dietrich in 1964.