Gerhard Weber (photographer)

This article is about the Berlin photographer Gerhard Weber. For the Rostock photographer of the same name, see Gerhard Weber (photographer, Rostock) .

Gerhard Weber (* 1940 in Berlin ) is a German photographer.

life and work

Gerhard Weber was born in 1940 in Berlin-Kreuzberg . After his father fell near Leningrad in 1944 , the family moved to Nordhausen in Thuringia , and a little later to Altenburg , where he spent his childhood. After graduating from school, he trained as a top lathe operator in 1956/57 and then served in the army with the transport police . Since 1964 Weber worked as a specialist methodologist for folk art at the Kreiskulturhaus in Grimma , whose management he took over two years later and held it until 1970. In the same year he founded the Grimma photography group , which he headed until 2004. From 1965 to 1970 he completed a distance learning course at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) in Leipzig , from which he graduated as a qualified photographer. In the 1970s and early 1980s Weber had a few personal exhibitions, successfully participated in photo competitions and festivals, and received numerous awards. In the spring of 1983 he received the offer to create a free work photographically for the Society for Photography in the Kulturbund der DDR . Animated by the success of the exhibition, Weber worked as a freelance photographer from 1986 . The next project was dedicated to the people in his place of residence Colditz , a small town with about 7,000 inhabitants at the time. With a tripod and medium format camera , without flash and with long exposure times, he portrayed around 80 Colditz families in their personal life over three years. In June 1990, in the middle of the fall of the Wall , the recordings were shown again on site in an open-air exhibition. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he documented with impressive pictures in Berlin, Leipzig and Colditz, Weber developed into one of the most important picture authors in East Germany . Particularly noteworthy are the expeditions to the country that Weber undertook together with his wife Brigitte, who was responsible for the texts, for the local editorial staff of the Leipziger Volkszeitung . Under the title forays through the country. Village impressions from AZ were presented to around 400 villages in the region between 1992 and 2003. These impressions are by no means a sum of snapshots, but rather unique documents of a change in structures pervading all areas of life, but occasionally also evidence of the persistence of everyday life: Much turned out to be astonishingly tenacious: the women continued to live with their indestructible, colorful floral Dederon aprons, one extra for every occasion. So there were the household, the garden, the stable and above all the most beautiful, the shopping apron, which was just called the consumer apron. For their village series Gerhard Weber and Brigitte were with the 1994 Local Journalism Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation awarded. Today Weber lives and works in Grimma. In addition to social documentary topics, he deals with nude and landscape photography as well as with the viewing of his extensive archive, from which u. a. the volumes in the land of the Mulde and the road of the best. Wurzener group photos from 1970 to 1990 emerged. Hundreds of large-format exhibition prints fell victim to the flood of the century in 2002 . Gerhard Weber's negatives and slides up to 1990 have been in the Deutsche Fotothek in Dresden since the end of 2013 .

Individual proof

1. ↑ Gerhard Weber: In the land of the Mulde Leipzig: Lehmstedt 2009

Exhibitions (selection)

• LebensZeiten - In the middle of the country (open-air exhibition Muldewiese Höfgen 2011)
• Leipzig. Photography since 1939 (Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig 2011), participation in an exhibition
• Up close (Gut Haferkorn 2011)
• As if it were a piece of me ( Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig 2010)
• AT HOME - completely private (Marktgalerie Grimma 2010)
• Grimma, yesterday and today (District Museum Grimma 2010)
• In the land of the Mulde (Leipzig City Library 2009)
• Morbid aesthetics (former Casino Grimma 2006)
• Where the earth is a sphere again (Kunstverein Panitzsch 2006)
• The sun is over Nimbschen ( Seume-Haus Grimma 2005)
• WasserZeichen (Rathausgalerie Grimma 2003)
• Nude in the quarry (Museum Steinarbeiterhaus Hohburg 2002)
• The people of the village of Erlln (Goethe-Institut Washington (2002) and numerous other stations, until 2008)
• Between times (monument smithy Höfgen 2000, Städtische Galerie Döbeln 2003)
• Country life in the Muldental district (Städtische Galerie Grimma 1995)
• Gerhard Weber: As if it were a piece of me / Meissen porcelain . Colditz: Weber 1992.
• The people in the village of Erlln (open-air exhibition Erlln 1985, Kaunas 1986, Vilinius 1986, Ettlingen 1988 and others)
• Portrait and landscape (Kunsthaus Grimma 1976, district museum Wurzen 1976, also Wermsdorf and Colditz)

Web links

• Gerhard Weber in the Deutsche Fotothek
• www.weber-photodesign.de