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GERMAN ART: PHOTOGRAPHY OF
HERBERT LIST and HELGA PARIS
at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Art, Sin el Fil, on March 11
and 12, at 6:00 pm
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This
lecture series is looking at two German Photographers: Through their
respective experience of the past century Herbert List and Helga Paris
have created their own style and body of work.
Herbert List (1903-1975), student of literature and art history at
Heidelberg University, develops his own style of photography early on.
Strongly influenced by the European surrealist movement and Bauhaus
artists, he takes images of friends, architecture and composes
stillifes. Travelling through Europe with creative stops in London,
Paris and Italy he finds a new artistic playground in Greece from 1936
to 1941. The dense and highly composed works of the 1930’s coin the
term fotografia metafiscia.
He befriends Europe’s artistic elite and takes many portraits of
Braque, Cocteau, Miro and Picasso – to name a few. His work turns
slightly sinister in 1944/45 with a series on the Panoptikum in Vienna
and the war ruins of Munich. He starts working as a contributor to
Magnum in 1951. Returning to Italy with renewed interest, his work
shifts from surreal to neo-realistic: street scenes and contemplative
photo essays fascinate him. Peer-Olaf Richter, the president and
curator of the Herbert List Estate will be at the ALBA on the 11th of
March, at 6 pm to talk about List’s life and his work as a
photographer.
Also Helga Paris, a documentary photographer born in 1938 in Gollnow in
Pomerania and grew up in Berlin, will give a lecture on the 12th of
March also at 6 pm at the ALBA about her career, influences and
experiences of a freelance photographer. Helga Paris studied fashion
design and worked as a graphic artist. Her first experiences started in
1964 when she took photographs of her surroundings in the Prenzlauer
Berg area of Berlin: her children, neighbours and street scenes. She
works almost exclusively in black and white. She explains this choice
by saying: “There is still so much to be done in black in white.” She
works only with natural light, doesn’t stage-set scenes, but documents
them. Since her autobiographical series “Erinnnerung an Z.” and
“Friedrichshain” from 1993/94, she sometimes uses unfocused pictures to
represent her mental images. One object is in sharp relief while the
rest is out of focus.
Exhibitions of Helga Paris can be seen in the Sprengel Museum in
Hannover, Germany.
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