Charlotte Mathesie

Charlotte Mathesie (* 1914 in Berlin ) was a German photographer .

Life

Charlotte Mathesie learned photography from her father Max Mathesie , who ran a studio at 164 Köpenicker Strasse, and passed her master craftsman examination in 1937. This made her the youngest photographer master in Berlin. A marriage was short-lived.

She specialized in portraits and family pictures. The Mathesie studio including the photo archive was bombed on February 3, 1945. In the same year Charlotte Mathesie set up a new studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg at Adalbertstrasse 11. In the post-war period, however, she mainly worked as a traveling photographer. In 1952 the first apprentice began his training with Mathesie; In total, she trained 16 young photographers. After the Berlin Wall was erected, she began with the “Pictures over the Wall” - portrait and family pictures of people in West Berlin for their relatives in East Berlin. Later she mainly photographed guest workers , but her archive also contained pictures of Sigmar Polke and Isa Genzken .

In 1987 she gave up working in her photo studio for health reasons. In 1993, her successor Michaela Niebuhr was forced to close the studio due to rising rents. Charlotte Mathesie's archive became the property of the Kreuzberg Museum .

Discount and aftermath

The 300,000 or so negatives formed the basis of an exhibition that was put together in 1998 and entitled Smile Now! was first shown in Berlin. Stéphane Bauer , Peter Funken , Katharina Hohmann and Helga Lieser from the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin transferred the images, which they selected according to “encyclopedic generic terms”, onto three-meter-long paper webs and provided a “cross-section through the genre of studio photography that [...] reflects on the social and aesthetic change in Germany from the post-war period to the beginning of the eighties ”, together.

Martha Erna Kaso was a customer who visited Charlotte Mathesie on a regular basis. A reviewer of the exhibition felt reminded of Cindy Sherman's transformations through the Kaso pictures .

In the Hamburger Abendblatt you can read about the thematically arranged series of images: “The mostly black and white photos are local history, but they also include history of the FRG since 1945. No art photos, no grainy black and white with aesthetic demands are laid out here. The photos represent the predominantly smaller people, whose relationship to their own image still seems unbroken. Their sometimes involuntary comedy is a product of time. ”This comedy, which arises when aesthetic models lose their strength, continues the author, was first recognized by artists. Martin Kippenberger is mentioned, for example , who posed in Charlotte Mathesie's studio in 1977 “with the concern of ironic refraction”.

Katharina Hohmann herself commented: “The reorganization of the archive that has become trash aims to encourage and guide people to view the photographic material from a contemporary perspective [...] In the sense of the exhibition, photography is a chronometer that helps to take part in social and cultural events. Behind the changing fashions and gestures, behind the furnishings and motifs, a changing social structure becomes recognizable. "

Katrin Bettina Müller from Tagesspiegel stated something similar : "The more generations are deposited in the archives of commercial photography, the more information we discover in them that was originally irrelevant. The photographic memory [...] reveals social roles and patterns in that you have slipped into a second skin. ”Müller saw Charlotte Mathesie's long-term adherence to black and white photography as a human-friendly gesture: unlike color images, one can carry out“ the intimate corrections of retouching ”here. Mathesie and her employees showed empathy and respected the "longing for the special" of those portrayed. Müller particularly emphasizes the series of pictures about Martha Erna Kaso, who died in 1983, as well as the dog portraits, which were a specialty of Mathesia: When looking at these pictures one becomes "sad because of the concentrated image of loneliness".

Thomas Gross von der Zeit said that such a “long-term observation of the district and its protagonists” was only possible in a studio like Charlotte Mathesies, which performed an everyday service to everyday customers in a largely isolated system: “If Berlin was an island and Kreuzberg an island in the middle of the island, then Mathesie was a darkroom within an island island on the edge of the western world. This is the only way to explain why the studio - in the days of the passport photo machines long a dinosaur - was able to defy the pressure to innovate for so long. It was not until the mid-seventies that Charlotte Mathesie [...] introduced color photography in her studio. With black and white, the convention of the bourgeois portrait, painstakingly maintained under petty bourgeois circumstances, was lost, the first signifiers of pop culture penetrate the hermeticism of the island world [...] in front of and behind the camera suddenly there are freaks who look at the image of a new one Try to maintain time along. In this respect, the Mathesie output of the seventies already has something tragic: Trash photography against its will. "

literature

• House of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany (ed.): Women objective. Photographers 1940 to 1950. Bonn 2001, ISBN 3-87909-752-6 , p. 137 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany (ed.): Women objective. Photographers 1940 to 1950. Bonn 2001, ISBN 3-87909-752-6 , p. 137 f.
2. ↑ Photo Studio Max Mathesie (Breslau 1869-1956 Berlin) in Berlin on www.köpenicker-strasse.de
3. ↑ Peter Funken: On Circe's Island. Report from an archive. on jungle.world , July 1, 1998.
4. ↑ Oliver Bätz: Im Blick Berlin. Arbeitskreis Berliner Regionalmuseen, 2003, ISBN 3-930929-18-X , p. 107. ( limited preview in Google book search)
5. ^ Daniela Martens: Talking Places. In: Der Tagesspiegel. October 10, 2011. (online)
6. ↑ Radek Krolczyk: A spot can have something of spontaneous liberation. on www.kreiszeitung.de , August 9, 2016.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Katrin Bettina Müller: Isn't that Aunt Elli, for example? In: Der Tagesspiegel. July 20, 1998. (online)
8. ↑ ^{a b} bgg: Now smile! In: The world . June 22nd, 2000. (online)
9. ↑ wj: Really friendly. In: Hamburger Abendblatt. June 2, 2000 (online)
10. ↑ Now smile! on www.katharinahohmann.de
11. ↑ Thomas Gross: Microcosm, goodbye. In: The time. 26/2000, June 21, 2000. (online)