The ifa exhibition 'Zeitgeist Becomes Form. German Fashion Photography 1945 – 1995 lis more than just a simple history of fashion and how it was photographed. This exhibition offers much more, namely an overview, comprising a myriad of facets, which covers fifty years of the photography of fashion in Germany.
The pictorial language of the respective photographers, the model, her or his pose as well as the clothing, the background, and the technical quality of the photography take the viewer far beyond the respective 'ins', fads and trends of fashion, giving information of extraordinary interest about the so-called Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, about changes in society, codes of morality, and the feelings and longings of people at a certain point in time. The increasing internationalization of fashion photos, beginning in the 1960s, is documented in the exhibition, just as is the renunciation of a photographic ideal, which had seen its most significant task in the illustration of details of the creations of a given couturier. The question of whether – in our 'village of world media' (Eco) – a German dialect, as it were, can be heard in the international photographic language is to be answered in this exhibition.
The curator F C Gundlach has selected 39 photographs for this 'tour' of five decades of fashion photography. Wherever possible, a thematic sequence of up to five pictures was selected, in order to show what is especially typical of the work of the respective photographer. All in all, the exhibition contains 188 photographs, all of which are documented in its 132-page catalogue. The authors of the catalogue texts are the curator F C Gundlach, Enno Kaufhold, and Klaus Honnef.
Exhibition catalogue
Zeitgeist Becomes Form. German Fashion Photography 1945–1995 – Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), 1995. – 123 pp. – Order Catalogue
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