Jürgen Sieker

Jürgen Sieker (born May 5, 1949 in Melle ) is a German photographer .

Artistic creation

Growing up in Karlsruhe, Sieker studied psychology, education, history and German in Heidelberg and Göttingen . In the mid-1970s Sieker moved to the Bremen area, where he lived and worked for a long time, before moving to Eisenach in 2006 . He has been taking photos since he was 12 years old.

The first photo series were made in the 1970s. At that time he mainly photographed cultural landscapes. During this time, people gradually come into the picture in his depictions of German and Italian cities as well as in his industrial landscapes. However, the environment that surrounds him remains dominant.

This process continues when dealing with the topic of television, understood as a look behind the scenes. Jürgen Sieker was allowed to take part in areas that are otherwise taboo for journalists. So he was z. B. invited to film a crime scene with Götz George . The first studies of stars emerge, which the photographer captured in atmospherically dense images. For the first time, some of the stars, who are otherwise more interested in effective glamor photos, were ready to face a more critical, expressive approach of a photographer.

In the end, Sieker developed the portrayal of the stars into an independent theme: The surroundings were now completely left out, the photographer concentrated entirely on the physiognomy of the sitter. There arise u. a. Face studies by Willy Brandt , Michail Gorbatschow , Marcel Marceau , Armin Mueller-Stahl , Horst Janssen , Naomi Campbell and many others. The recordings published in 1993 in the illustrated book famous faces show “wrinkles, folds, warps that you would otherwise not see. Lived life. ”( Die Zeit , March 25, 1994) The photographer had come so close to his models that some of the faces were only partially visible. He practiced an even more far-reaching form of approach when working on his series Hommage à Toulouse-Lautrec , which was practiced in 1994 in the Bremen Kunsthalle . Like the painter, Sieker befriends the artists of a variety show. In this way he succeeds in taking pictures even in your private sphere. He captured his models in their private surroundings and, alternating between identity and role, depicted the tension in modern subjectivity.

The confrontation with Toulouse-Lautrec arouses Jürgen Sieker's interest in dealing more with the topic of movement: in his series Movimente , artistically staged in the studio, reminiscent of sculptures, he deals with the interplay of forces in the individual limbs, the structural forms of the body and its possibilities of movement as a means of expression. Continuing the examination of the moving body, series about the Russian State Ballet, the Spanish flamenco star Maria Serrano and the expressive dancer Leonard Cruz were created in the second half of the 1990s . The author does not see his dancers as models that he uses for his own purposes, but as partners with whom he works out the respective image.

To this day, the focus of Jürgen Sieker's work is on the work of other artists. In 1999, in collaboration with various museums (including Überseemuseum Bremen, Ägyptisches Museum Berlin, Museum Schnütgen Cologne), he began his series Head to Head , which was presented in the Überseemuseum Bremen and for which an illustrated book of the same name was published (2001 by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen with the reddot award best of the best). In this series Sieker deals intensively with the works of sculptors from all over the world. He lets their works enter into a dialogue and gives the viewer a new perspective on the works of art presented.

The author continues to be fascinated by the dialogue between fine art and photography: Paris est une femme mainly shows works that consist of double images - often a section of a painting from a Paris museum that is confronted with scenes from Parisian street life. In Sieker's pictures the paintings come back to life, they arrive in the present, regardless of whether it is a Botticelli from the 15th century, Rembrandt's " Bathsheba " or the "Kiss" by Picasso .

While Sieker was a consistent black and white photographer up to now, he has been working exclusively with color photos since his series Paris est une femme .

Publications

• famous faces, Kiel 1993
• Homage to Toulouse-Lautrec, Bremen 1994
• Head to head, Bremen 2000
• Tête à tête. Nefertiti meets Naomi, exhib. Cat. Schaffhausen, 2007

Web links

• Literature by and about Jürgen Sieker in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Museum shows unusual photographs by Jürgen Sieker, in: Thüringer Allgemeine , March 25, 2011, online at: http://eisenach.thueringer-allgemeine.de/web/lokal/kultur/detail/-/specific/Museum-sehen- unusual-photographs-by-Juergen-Sieker-326672894 (last accessed : October 6, 2016)