On the occasion of the 80th birthday of Stern photographer and Worldpress Photo Award winner Wolfgang Kunz, a pop-up exhibition at Camaro Haus shows a selection of early photographs. Six decades ago, Kunz captured unusual views and rare moments in people’s lives with his black-and-white photographs on the streets of European and North African cities.
Courtesy of Camaro Haus – © Wolfgang Kunz, Rauchende Männer, Amsterdam 1966
Before Wolfgang Kunz (*1942) travelled to war zones in Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Turkey as a photojournalist for Stern and Zeit magazine from the 1970s onwards, or delivered travel reports for Geo, he went on an independent search for motifs in European and North African cities in the 1960s. In Marrakech, London, Paris, Valencia, Barcelona and Ibiza, he met people on the street in their life situations, which he captured with his Voigtländer Vitomatic 1a or the Mamiyaflex-C in special moments and crops and developed in his darkroom on silver gelatine baryta paper.
The exhibition is accompanied by the photo edition “Wolfgang Kunz ’80” of twelve motifs, limited to six copies each, from 1961 to 1988, numbered and signed, produced as fine art prints in 40 x 50 cm folding mounts.
The edition is published jointly by the Alexander and Renata Camaro Foundation, Artco Gallery, Artikel Editionen and Galerie Probst.
With a scholarship from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Wolfgang Kunz captured Swinging London in 1966 and qualified as a Stern photographer, as which he went to the Vietnam War in 1969. In 1970, the twen switches from Leica to Nikon and from Stern to Zeit Magazin, for which he is on location during the Northern Ireland conflict. This was followed by reportages and travelogues, including a work lasting several years on the historical genocide of the Armenians in Turkey, which was published in Geo and also internationally. Wolfgang Kunz practises the high school of reportage photography known from the Magnum circle, moves up in the league of Thomas Hoepker and Robert Lebeck, is Worldpress Photo Prize winner in 1988. In 1988 he organised the first European Month of Photography in Hamburg. Together with 14 colleagues, he had already founded the photo agency
Bilderberg founded (1982). In the late 1990s, he passed on his experience to students at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art. Since 2010, Wolfgang Kunz has been taking care of the artistic work of his father Karl Kunz (1905-1971). He is responsible for the exhibition Surrealism in Germany? Art from 1919 to 1949, at the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen with his paintings, and in the summer of 2021, on the occasion of the anniversary of his death, he will present his father with a retrospective at the Kühlhaus Berlin.
The Camaro Haus, which was built in 1893 by the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen 1867 e.V. as the association’s own drawing and painting school for women, today once again fulfils the function of a cross-disciplinary cultural institution.
WHERE?
Camaro Haus
Potsdamer Straße 98 A
10785 Berlin-Tiergarten
WHEN?
Tue, Wed, Fri 1 – 5 pm, Thu 1 – 8 pm
By arrangement, times outside the opening hours can also be arranged.
COSTS?
Admission is free of charge.
The Camaro Foundation will take a winter break between 23/12/2022 and 02/01/2023.
