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Volker Hinz Text Peter-Matthias Gaede In Love with Photography

Volker Hinz lebt für seine Leidenschaft, die Foto­grafie. Bereits als 20-jähriger verkaufte er seine ersten Bilder, und mit 24 Jahren wurde er Leiter der „Sven Simon Bildagentur“ in Bonn, ehe er 1974 zum Magazin Stern nach Hamburg kam, dessen visuelles Erscheinungsbild er vierzig Jahre lang entscheidend mitgeprägt hat. Hinz hat ein außerordentlich umfangreiches und breites Oeuvre geschaffen und zählt zu den bedeutendsten Fotografen der Welt.

Peter-Matthias Gaede studierte Sozialwissenschaften an der Universität Göttingen und absolvierte die Henri-­Nannen-Schule. Nach drei Jahren bei der Frankfurter­Rundschau wechselte er 1983 zum Magazin GEO und war von 1994 bis 2014 dessen Chefredakteur. Gaede ist unter anderem Mitglied im Stiftungsrat der Körber-Stiftung, im Kuratorium von Reporter ohne Grenzen und seit 2014 im Vorstand von UNICEF Deutschland.

Volker Hinz lives and breathes photography, his passion. As a 20-year-old he sold his first pictures and at just 24 he became director of the Sven Simon Bildagentur in Bonn, before joining Stern magazine in Hamburg in 1974. For 40 years he played a key role in shaping the visual aesthetic of the magazine. Hinz has created a comprehensive and varied oeuvre and ranks among the most influential photographers worldwide.

Peter-Matthias Gaede studied social sciences at the University of Göttingen and attended the Henri Nannen School of Journalism. He worked at the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper for three years before joining GEO magazine in 1983, serving as its Editor-in-Chief from 1994 to 2014. Gaede is on the board of several organizations, including the Körber Foundation, Reporters without Borders, Germany, and, since 2014, UNICEF Germany.

9 783903 101005

ISBN 978-3-903101-00-5

Volker Hinz In Love with Photography

ISBN 978-3-903101-00-5

IN LOVE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY ist ein einzigartiger Schatz der Fotografiegeschichte, der im Archiv von Volker Hinz – einem der bedeutendsten und dem vielleicht unermüdlichsten Fotografen unserer Zeit – seiner Entdeckung harrte. Die besten Fotografen der letzten fünf Jahrzehnte treffen einander in den Bildern des Porträt-Magiers Volker Hinz – und werden jetzt erstmalig gezeigt.

IN LOVE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY is a unique treasure in the history of photography waiting to be lifted from the archive of Volker Hinz, one of the most influential, and possibly the most indefatigable, photographer of our times. The best photographers of the last five decades meet in the pictures of portrait magician Volker Hinz – and are shown here for the first time.

FEP European Photo Book of the Year Awards | Best Editor 2015

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IN LOVE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY ist ein einzigartiger Schatz der Fotografiegeschichte, der im Archiv von Volker Hinz – einem der bedeutendsten und dem vielleicht unermüdlichsten Fotografen unserer Zeit – seiner Entdeckung harrte. Ein Schatz, der von einem leidenschaftlichen Sammler von Porträts in fast fünfzigjähriger Arbeit angehäuft wurde. Und jetzt erstmalig gezeigt wird. Volker Hinz hat diejenigen fotografiert, die sonst hinter ihren Kameras verborgen bleiben.

Wann immer er ihnen begegnet ist, hat Hinz mit seiner Hasselblad, Nikon oder Leica seine Kolleginnen und Kollegen fotografiert. Und zwar überall: bei der Arbeit, zu Hause, in öffentlichen wie privaten Momenten. So ist eine einzigartige Sammlung der renommiertesten Fotografen der zweiten Hälfte des 20. und des beginnenden 21. Jahrhunderts entstanden. Eine Sammlung jener Persönlichkeiten, die das Menschheitsgedächtnis mit jenen Bildern ausgestattet haben, die unserer Erinnerung Halt geben. Und Peter-Matthias Gaede, 20 Jahre lang Chefredakteur von GEO, hat Volker Hinz zugehört und die Geschichte dieser Begegnungen aufgezeichnet und in den Kontext der Kunstgeschichte gestellt.

IN LOVE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY is a unique find in the history of photography, waiting to be unearthed in the archives of Volker Hinz, one of the most important and indefatigable photo­graphers of our time. A treasure, amassed in almost 50 years by a passionate collector of portraits and now presented for the first time. Volker Hinz photographed those who normally remain hidden behind their cameras. Whenever and wherever he encountered them, Hinz photographed his colleagues with his Hasselblad, Nikon or Leica: at work, at home, in public or private moments.

This is how a unique collection of the most renowned photographers of the second half of the 20th and the early 21st centuries came about. A collection of individuals who provided the images that sustain humanity’s memory. Peter-Matthias Gaede, Editor-in-Chief of GEO magazine for 20 years, has listened to Volker Hinz and relates the history of these encounters, putting it in an aesthetic context.

Volker Hinz In Love with Photography

Text Peter-Matthias Gaede

Edition Lammerhuber

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Volker Hinz In Love with Photography

Inge Morath Arthur Miller Roxbury 1979

Volker Hinz  6

Inge Morath Arthur Miller Roxbury 1979

Volker Hinz  6

Andy Warhol New York 1984

Volker Hinz  14

Andy Warhol New York 1984

Volker Hinz  14

Hinz’ photographs are encouragement to an imaginative confrontation with them Enno Kaufhold

Hinz and what is hinzy. Are the pictures in this volume an ‘encouragement to an imaginative confrontation with them,’ as Enno Kaufhold says? Of course. They are imbued with an interesting body language and interesting for this reason alone that the depicted photographers ‘speak’ not like they normally do.

Very often they are witty, sometimes they are a question mark. Always carefully observed, condensed, immediate. And so attractive, so exciting, that you catch yourself wanting to turn back to the page you just left. Volker Hinz never tires.

I am in love with photography Volker Hinz

One reason for this is the fact that the photo series of August Sander, which Hinz calls ‘standing-there pictures’, is just one of several options to nail down the personality of a man. He wants to be entertained and he wants to entertain. He wants emotions, that ‘something happens in the faces.’ He wants to learn.

And how well he can do it, how, from anticipated movements, he will find the one moment when, as he calls it, “The people are fully themselves and reveal the most about themselves, their surroundings and their traditions,” and indirectly always something about the web of their experiences, that is his secret. Or maybe not a secret, because Hinz does explain what he does: “You must never let the photographed person out of your sight and you must always be ready, in photographic and emotional terms, for the situation at hand.”

The unique book of a photographer who photographed photographers, In Love With Photography. This man remains a revelation.

To be emotionally prepared – this is probably the key in Volker Hinz’ hand. It may mean sheer hunting instinct – and he does have that. But with him it is more: His pictures exude the great inner joy that seizes him when he intelligently deciphers a person that means something to him. When he is able to show someone in a way in which that person has not been seen before, even if it only differs by a nuance from the already known. Or, vice versa, is only a nuance more typical, even closer to the image that we have had of someone.

“We are surrounded by thousands of images. Blinded by routine, we don’t see most of them. By directing my lens on something, I ask a question and sometimes the photograph is the answer. I am the one who is being taught.” Lisette Model said this and Volker Hinz made a portrait of her in an empty room, in the year she died, 1983. She did not want to hold on to her stick, she put it away. The stick fell down.

Hinz stood it up again before pressing the shutter button, the stick now several metres away from the erect, great old lady, but in the frame. A classic Hinz mix of respect for an icon and the desire to let the photograph give a disrespectful answer. Preferably in black and white, which Hinz liked for its ‘different reality and at the same time this flair of old masters.’

August 2015. How to talk about Volker Hinz’ work: in the present perfect, the past, the present tense?

Hard to say. Three years ago he was discharged as the last of originally 20 staff photographers at Stern.

Now, at the age of 68, he sometimes shuts himself in for consecutive days and nights in his large archive, surrounded by 37 metres of shelving that holds the chronology of his life, his treasure, incredibly well ordered, most diligently maintained. And critically. “For every film”, Hinz says, “you manage one usable picture, only on every hundredth film a sensation.” His credo is: If an image does not engage the viewer within three seconds, then forget about it.

Film? Yes! “Photography does not get better by digitizing”, says Hinz, rather he finds it ‘soulless’. He sees himself ‘on the way back to a classic.’ Which just sounds like an intention. One could just as well say: Volker Hinz is already a classic. Without being past. In response to the question what his personal golden age might have been, he says, “my entire working life.” And he will not let it be defined as over by anybody, because what he loves about photography is, “that you can spend your entire life in it.” In it, not with it. That is exactly what he means.

The vitality that is evident on the 424 pages of this book, is entirely his own. His pictures lack the big grey, the sombreness, the penchant for unpeopled abstractions, the preference of structures over content, which ran for a while through university-socialized German photography. There is not retreat into new or old inwardness. No motion, snap-frozen country, dry rigidity, bathroom tiles, ornamental fir tree in chains, tree stump beneath motorway slip road and beware of crooked smiles: Such an educational, dour, rigorously ordered view is foreign to Hinz’ way of looking at the world.

What he is serious about, though, is the significance of his profession. Which makes this book something of an invocation of the past. Hinz himself talks about the ‘ghosts’ he wants to bring back once more to put them between the living.

Volker Hinz 44

It was an inconspicuous moment, when Hinz and photographer and publisher, Lois Lammerhuber, had the idea for this call-back: They were looking at a picture of Richard Avedon’s shoe last that Hinz took at shoemaker John Lobb’s in Paris. To make a book about photographers because of that? Not even Hinz himself knew then when he had first met Inge Morath, where Ansel Adams or how often Stephan Lupino. But what he then unearthed over six months from countless files can only be called a oncein-a-lifetime project. Unrepeatable.

Volker Hinz Theodor Hinz Hamburg 2005

Hinz’ photographs are encouragement to an imaginative confrontation with them Enno Kaufhold

Hinz and what is hinzy. Are the pictures in this volume an ‘encouragement to an imaginative confrontation with them,’ as Enno Kaufhold says? Of course. They are imbued with an interesting body language and interesting for this reason alone that the depicted photographers ‘speak’ not like they normally do.

Very often they are witty, sometimes they are a question mark. Always carefully observed, condensed, immediate. And so attractive, so exciting, that you catch yourself wanting to turn back to the page you just left. Volker Hinz never tires.

I am in love with photography Volker Hinz

One reason for this is the fact that the photo series of August Sander, which Hinz calls ‘standing-there pictures’, is just one of several options to nail down the personality of a man. He wants to be entertained and he wants to entertain. He wants emotions, that ‘something happens in the faces.’ He wants to learn.

And how well he can do it, how, from anticipated movements, he will find the one moment when, as he calls it, “The people are fully themselves and reveal the most about themselves, their surroundings and their traditions,” and indirectly always something about the web of their experiences, that is his secret. Or maybe not a secret, because Hinz does explain what he does: “You must never let the photographed person out of your sight and you must always be ready, in photographic and emotional terms, for the situation at hand.”

The unique book of a photographer who photographed photographers, In Love With Photography. This man remains a revelation.

To be emotionally prepared – this is probably the key in Volker Hinz’ hand. It may mean sheer hunting instinct – and he does have that. But with him it is more: His pictures exude the great inner joy that seizes him when he intelligently deciphers a person that means something to him. When he is able to show someone in a way in which that person has not been seen before, even if it only differs by a nuance from the already known. Or, vice versa, is only a nuance more typical, even closer to the image that we have had of someone.

“We are surrounded by thousands of images. Blinded by routine, we don’t see most of them. By directing my lens on something, I ask a question and sometimes the photograph is the answer. I am the one who is being taught.” Lisette Model said this and Volker Hinz made a portrait of her in an empty room, in the year she died, 1983. She did not want to hold on to her stick, she put it away. The stick fell down.

Hinz stood it up again before pressing the shutter button, the stick now several metres away from the erect, great old lady, but in the frame. A classic Hinz mix of respect for an icon and the desire to let the photograph give a disrespectful answer. Preferably in black and white, which Hinz liked for its ‘different reality and at the same time this flair of old masters.’

August 2015. How to talk about Volker Hinz’ work: in the present perfect, the past, the present tense?

Hard to say. Three years ago he was discharged as the last of originally 20 staff photographers at Stern.

Now, at the age of 68, he sometimes shuts himself in for consecutive days and nights in his large archive, surrounded by 37 metres of shelving that holds the chronology of his life, his treasure, incredibly well ordered, most diligently maintained. And critically. “For every film”, Hinz says, “you manage one usable picture, only on every hundredth film a sensation.” His credo is: If an image does not engage the viewer within three seconds, then forget about it.

Film? Yes! “Photography does not get better by digitizing”, says Hinz, rather he finds it ‘soulless’. He sees himself ‘on the way back to a classic.’ Which just sounds like an intention. One could just as well say: Volker Hinz is already a classic. Without being past. In response to the question what his personal golden age might have been, he says, “my entire working life.” And he will not let it be defined as over by anybody, because what he loves about photography is, “that you can spend your entire life in it.” In it, not with it. That is exactly what he means.

The vitality that is evident on the 424 pages of this book, is entirely his own. His pictures lack the big grey, the sombreness, the penchant for unpeopled abstractions, the preference of structures over content, which ran for a while through university-socialized German photography. There is not retreat into new or old inwardness. No motion, snap-frozen country, dry rigidity, bathroom tiles, ornamental fir tree in chains, tree stump beneath motorway slip road and beware of crooked smiles: Such an educational, dour, rigorously ordered view is foreign to Hinz’ way of looking at the world.

What he is serious about, though, is the significance of his profession. Which makes this book something of an invocation of the past. Hinz himself talks about the ‘ghosts’ he wants to bring back once more to put them between the living.

Volker Hinz 44

It was an inconspicuous moment, when Hinz and photographer and publisher, Lois Lammerhuber, had the idea for this call-back: They were looking at a picture of Richard Avedon’s shoe last that Hinz took at shoemaker John Lobb’s in Paris. To make a book about photographers because of that? Not even Hinz himself knew then when he had first met Inge Morath, where Ansel Adams or how often Stephan Lupino. But what he then unearthed over six months from countless files can only be called a oncein-a-lifetime project. Unrepeatable.

Volker Hinz Theodor Hinz Hamburg 2005

Lee Miller Washington DC 1982

Volker Hinz Appartement New York 1982

Volker Hinz  72

Lee Miller Washington DC 1982

Volker Hinz Appartement New York 1982

Volker Hinz  72

Leica Allen Ginsberg Lawrence 1987

Volker Hinz  114

Leica Allen Ginsberg Lawrence 1987

Volker Hinz  114

Leica Allen Ginsberg Lawrence 1987

Volker Hinz  114

Wilfried Bauer Paris 1988

David Hockney Hollywood 1988

Volker Hinz  128

Francesco Scavullo New York 1993

Cindy Sherman Paris 1993

Volker Hinz  200

Francesco Scavullo New York 1993

Cindy Sherman Paris 1993

Volker Hinz  200

Photo Call Cannes 2000

Volker Hinz  276

Photo Call Cannes 2000

Volker Hinz  276

Saul Leiter Hamburg 2012

Terry O'Neill Hamburg 2012

Volker Hinz  378

Saul Leiter Hamburg 2012

Terry O'Neill Hamburg 2012

Volker Hinz  378

Werner Mahler Ute Mahler Hamburg 2015

Françoise Kirkland Douglas Kirkland Hamburg 2015

Volker Hinz  414

Werner Mahler Ute Mahler Hamburg 2015

Françoise Kirkland Douglas Kirkland Hamburg 2015

Volker Hinz  414