The start of a career as photographer – complete documentation of the Berlin Havelhöhe cycle

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Benjamin Katz

Berlin Havelhöhe 1960/1961

Benjamin Katz’s photographs of Berlin Havelhöhe form both a social and an artistic document: Katz’s beginnings as a photographer and his great interest in the photography of the modern age will be found here along side the location itself with its traces of its past as a National Socialist Luftwaffe base, converted into a hospital for patients from all walks of society, not only Nazis but also the persecuted.

description

In the 1950s the hospital Berlin-Havelhöhe (today the Clinic for Anthroposophical Medicine) took over the building that had originally been erected as the National Socialist State Academy for Aviation. It was also there that the pilots who had attacked Guernica in 1934 as part of the Condor Legion had been trained. In 1960, Benjamin Katz fell ill with tuberculosis for a period of one and a half years. He stayed in Havelhöhe and produced an extensive collection of photographs during this time. 48 enlargements together with 380 working prints from the negatives on 30 facsimiled DIN-A4 pages document on the one hand the everyday routine as a patient, but also the architecture and the traces of National Socialism.

press commentaries

Benjamin Katz bringt seine Einstellung mit dem Satz auf den Punkt: »Das Endprodukt der Kunst ist wunderbar.« Daraus spricht eine Unbekümmertheit, die auch all seinen Fotografien eigen ist. Sie sind aufgenommen mit einer wie selbstverständlich wirkenden Leichtigkeit, die früh schon zu seinem Markenzeichen wurde. Wie hart erarbeitet diese ist, weiß man erst jetzt - durch die Aufnahmen aus der Zeit im Sanatorium.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Details

Ed. Barbara Engelbach

In stock

Contributions by Y. Dziewior, B. Engelbach, B. Katz
Text: English / German
160 pages, 78 b/w illustrations
17 x 24 cm, hardcover

ISBN: 978-3-7774-3287-8

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