Deichtorhallen Hamburg – F. C. Gundlach Collection

This exhibition is centred around the diverse ways of­ depicting corporeality, with the body understood as a medium that can express a variety of roles, projections, desires, and fantasies. The objects from the F.C. Gundlach Collection presented here – collected from the mid-1970s onwards – are not only of great contemporary relevance in light of the way in which the queer community has reconfigured itself, but also provide a glimpse into an exciting yet ­ simultaneously very intimate area of Gundlach’s private collection – that which is concerned with the vulnerable, watchful, tamed and untamed, patient and restless body, as explored through the extremely diverse perspectives and motivations of the roughly 60 photographers whose work is present.

This project has arisen against the backdrop of the collector’s 100th birthday. From the end of the 1940s through to the mid-1980s, Gundlach’s fashion photography played a very active role in shaping an especially prestigious and influential version of femininity in Germany – in ­ particular through its publication in a great number of magazines,­ including Film und Frau and Brigitte. The exhibition’s insights into his more private view, diverging from these norms, of the diverse ways in which photographers consciously and unconsciously depicted corporeality in a more critical fashion, in the process always reflecting social trends, not only helps expand our understanding of the breadth of his photographic interests, but also reveals the great pleasure he took in looking and in discovery – inclinations that he would never have been able to satisfy in his work as a professional­ fashion photo­grapher.
With around 300 exhibits dated from between 1900 to the present day, the technical processes on display range from albumin and gelatine silver prints, cibachrome and chromogenic prints, and the platinum palladium process all the way through to digital photography. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring texts by Enno Kaufhold, Ulrich Pohlmann, Jana Haeckel, and Sabine Schnakenberg.

This exhibition is curated by Sabine Schnakenberg.

With works by Diane Arbus, Hans Bellmer, Erwin Blumenfeld, Katharina Bosse, Bill Brandt, Larry Clark, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Greg Gorman, Fergus Greer, Jenny ­ Holzer, Jürgen Klauke, Les Krims, Vera von Lehndorff, Robert ­ Mapplethorpe,­ Kembra Pfahler, Jimmy de Sana, Cindy ­ Sherman and Joel Peter ­Witkin, among others.