Jürgen Baldiga

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Grave of Jürgen Baldiga, engraving after a drawing by Jean Cocteau . A shrink-wrapped photo shows him with Melitta Sundström

Jürgen Baldiga (born October 27, 1959 in Essen , † December 4, 1993 in Berlin ) was a German artist and photographer.

Life and work

Jürgen Baldiga was born into a family of miners and grew up in the Ruhr area. In 1979 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a barman, cook, sex worker and casual worker. He had no academic artistic training, but was interested in the fine arts, photography and poetry. In 1984 he learned that he had become infected with HIV , which was new at the time , which led to the outbreak of AIDS in the sick because of drugs that had not yet been developed . Baldiga decided to take photographs of the consequences of the illness in himself and in others affected by the gay scene. In doing so, he not only broke the taboo of dying, but also that of homosexuality. His black and white photos show “people who self-confidently understood and staged themselves as queens, with wigs and costume jewelry from the old clothes collection and an eye shadow and self-confidence to kneel down”, but also bodies heavily marked by the disease. Baldiga is considered to be "the great chronicler of the HIV crisis in Berlin". His work includes 5000 photos, but also Super 8 recordings and music recordings. Baldiga's friend, the photographer Aron Neubert, photographed Jürgen Baldiga during the last two years of his life. Every month a picture was taken, the last of the dead Baldiga. In 1993 he committed suicide, the photo produced for his obituary showed him with a clown nose. His grave is in the Old St. Matthew Cemetery .

Recall

Jürgen Baldiga's estate is kept by the Schwules Museum Berlin , which showed a retrospective in 1997 in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and later also often presented individual pictures in themed exhibitions.

Aron Neubert's 23 photographs of the seriously ill and dying Badinga were published in Neubert's book “Warmth that only fire can give us”.

On the 20th anniversary of his death, a picture of Baldiga was published on the cover of the gay magazine Victory Column . On a cover picture of the "Zitty" Baldiga himself held the gravestone, which had been made early on, in her arms.

In 2020, a documentary was made with the title Save the Fire (Director: Jasco Viefhues), in which many friends and companions of Baldigas remember him and the AIDS crisis, but also life in the gay scene in West Berlin.

Works

literature

  • Aron Neubert, Warmth that only fire can give us , Edition Lens, Cologne 1995, ISBN 3-9804363-0-6
  • Michael Brynntrup , Aide Mémoire - a gay memory protocol , portrait film with interview, 1995

Web links

Commons : Jürgen Baldiga  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jürgen Baldiga in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved January 7, 2015.
  2. ↑ Documentary “Save the Fire”: Ice cream sundae with a blowjob. In: taz. April 29, 2020, accessed May 1, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Information on the retrospective. Retrieved May 1, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Bernd Gaiser "Jürgen Baldiga: I am my own God. An interview", Berliner Schwulen Zeitung No. 25, Berlin 1980
personal data
SURNAME Baldiga, Jürgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH October 27, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1993
Place of death Berlin