Germans see Germans
Germans see Germans is a German photo project from 1993.
history
On August 26, 1993, Rudolf Scharping as chairman of the Prime Minister's Conference, Andreas von Schoeler as Lord Mayor of Frankfurt am Main and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz as editor-in-chief of Stern magazine opened the first exhibition entitled “Germans see Germans” in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt on the Main .
Around 500 photographs were the result of an invitation to tender by ARD and the star , which invited readers and viewers to submit photos on the topic. The Hessian Broadcasting annually produced four television spots in which prominent actors like Michael Quast and Heinz Schenk to calling to send in photos. The star advertised the campaign several times on the editorial page. Tens of thousands took part in the following years.
In 1995 another selection was exhibited in the House of History in Bonn. The exhibition was opened by Wolfgang Clement on behalf of Prime Minister Johannes Rau . In the same year the Hessischer Rundfunk produced a program with 500 photos, which was broadcast several times in the night program, accompanied by music by DJ Nour Nour.
As part of the Aviation History Collection project at Frankfurt am Main Airport, Dr. Michael Wustrack organized an exhibition with 250 exhibits from the archive in the airport gallery in the summer of 1996 and supplemented the exhibition with an additional collection of images, “Germans see Swiss”.
In 1999, Theo Scherling started the “click!” Project on behalf of the Goethe Institute. German learners around the world were called upon to shape their image of Germany. The participants received 120 reproductions from the archive German see Germans in postcard form, which they could add to the exhibition panel provided with their own photos and “German realities”. A wide variety of mobile museums on the topic were created. Representative picture panels became part of the archive.
A special feature of the time frame is that the first tenders started two years after reunification and the new federal states actually participated in a representative manner. The archive has been growing for twenty years and is being looked after by Theo Scherling after the German Photo Days gGmbH was dissolved in 1999. In July 2013, Theo Scherling and Wolfgang Fischer decided to document the archive online and to continue the campaign on the Internet.
Publications
In 1993, the first catalog for the exhibition in the Paulskirche was published by the German Photo Days gGmbH. At the end of August, the Stern published a more than 20-page publication for the opening of the exhibition. In 1995, the second catalog for the exhibition in the House of History was published by the German Photo Days gGmbH. At the same time, the publisher published a video catalog in collaboration with the Hessischer Rundfunk. The archive was sponsored by Deutsche Bahn AG , Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Hoechst AG , who published the campaign in their customer and staff magazines. In the same year 1995, Wolfgang Fischer installed the platform of the same name on the Internet and presented a selection of 500 photos, sorted by federal state (place of origin of the submission).
reception
Thomas Quinn wrote in a publication of the Lufthansa logbook, a customer magazine of Deutsche Lufthansa AG: "Not every picture is good, but all together are overwhelming."
Web links
- Official website (online exhibition from 1997)
literature
- Germans see Germans : a project [this catalog appears for the Stern exhibition "Germans see Germans", which opens on the occasion of the 1993 Photo Days in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main]. Edited by Wolfgang Behnken. Verlag Locher, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-930-05414-0 .
- Germans see Germans . [This catalog accompanies an exhibition that will be shown as part of the German Photo Days in the Rhineland from November 3 to 19, 1995 in the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn] / ed. from the House of History Foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany. Rheinland Verlag, Pulheim-Brauweiler 1995, ISBN 3-792-71524-4 .