Klaus Kammerichs

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Klaus Kammerichs, self-portrait, 1974, photo sculpture

Klaus Kammerichs (born December 1, 1933 in Iserlohn ) is a German photographer , sculptor and filmmaker .

Life

Klaus Kammerichs is the son of the typesetter Wilhelm Kammerichs and the seamstress Maria Kammerichs, b. Ellinghaus. He was born the middle of three children in Iserlohn, where his father, a passionate amateur photographer, worked for a newspaper. His older sister was the author Edith Frings-Kammerichs († 2017).

Kammerichs completed a photography apprenticeship in a portrait studio in his hometown. During his visit to the vocational school in Dortmund - one of his classmates was the later photographer, art historian and photo theorist Marlene Schnelle-Schneyder - he was strongly influenced by the Ruhr area , especially by industrial photos by Dortmund photographer Erich Angenendt . In Hagen and Wuppertal he attended exhibitions of modernism, which was suppressed until the end of the war, with works by Otto Dix , Paul Klee , Lionel Feininger and many others.

Klaus Kammerichs, Valencia, 1954, photography

After his apprenticeship, he worked for various regional newspapers in Duisburg and Unna and made trips through France and Spain, where he took landscapes, portraits and architecture. In 1953 he studied "Subjective Photography" with Otto Steinert in Saarbrücken. In 1954 he took part for the first time in the Cologne “Photokina” , to which its co-founder L. Fritz Gruber had invited him. The New York magazine Modern Photography selected him in January 1959 for Discovery of the Month . From 1956 to 1960 he studied fine art at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Otto Pankok and Otto Coester . His fellow students included Bert Gerresheim , Heinz Edelmann , Günther Uecker , Eva Beuys and Bernd Becher .

In 1966 Kammerichs became a lecturer at the Peter-Behrens-Werkkunstschule in Düsseldorf; 1973 Professor of Photography and Audiovisual Media at what was then the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences , where he taught until 1995. In 1994 he received the David Octavius ​​Hill Medal from the German Photographic Academy (DFA) in Leinfelden-Echterdingen.

Klaus Kammerichs lived in Düsseldorf until 1995, since then in Cologne and (until 2018) in Demerath / Eifel. He is married to the writer Eva Weissweiler , with whom he realized joint film, book and exhibition projects. He has five children.

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In addition to his work as an art, advertising and industrial photographer, Kammerichs designed numerous book covers for crime and science fiction novels together with Heinz Edelmann , which were published by rororo and Marion von Schröder , including classic titles by Hansjörg Martin , Frederik Pohl , John Bingham , Stephen Gilbert , Ian Wallace , and many others.

Klaus Kammerichs setting up his hand with pen photo sculpture on the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences campus , 1985

At the end of the sixties, the Kammerichs began to discover the third dimension for themselves. In his sculptural work he refers to the principle of photo sculpture . In a process known as Isohelie , he combined different brightness values ​​of a photographic original “to form a spatial layering (Stereoisohelie) with corresponding shades of gray. The object - a portrait, a Honda, a faucet - ends up in the labyrinth of its elementary particles. If you see these photo objects from the calculated perspective - mostly axilla projection [...] - they appear completely illusionistic. Every change in the point of view dissolves the realistic still photo into an abstractly structured, kinetic energy field. "

After the first presentations in the Düsseldorf gallery Hans-Jürgen Niepel and a large solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf , exhibitions of his photo sculptures followed in France, Greece, Poland, the USA, the Netherlands and Japan.

Klaus Kammerichs, Beethon, 1986, photo sculpture in front of the Beethovenhalle in Bonn

In 1986 he created the Beethoven sculpture Beethon in Bonn, which has become a much-visited landmark of the former federal capital. In 2008 he designed three life-size Karl Marx sculptures, A ghost is around in Europe , which were set up in the garden of the Karl Marx House in Trier. Other large sculptures in public space are in Bad Segeberg (Old World / New World) , Leinfelden-Echterdingen (L'Escapade) , Düsseldorf (hand with pencil) , Gifu (East-West-Double-Dragon) and Yokohama (Tiger) .

Since the nineties, Kammerichs has expanded the principle of quasi-realistic photo sculpture to include four-dimensional sculptures as a kinetic interpretation of space, time and movement, some of which can be traced back to Eadweard Muybridge's serial photography . Furthermore, a series of "anamorphoses", sculptural portraits of well-known artist personalities such as Kafka, Hemingway, Hitchcock, Robert and Clara Schumann, etc.

At the same time, there was an intensified engagement with the medium of film, mostly together with Eva Weissweiler, including “Sehstück” (4 minutes each, WDR Cologne), “Berlioz-Heine-Paris-Cologne” (8 minutes, WDR Cologne), “End of Romanticism - Schumann's Rhenish Years "(45 minutes, WDR Cologne)," Hommage à Nancorrow "(30 minutes)," Oh, you, my Marterhorn "(15 minutes)," Nationality: Writers: Immigrant authors in North Rhine-Westphalia "( 120 minutes, WDR Cologne) and am These films are partly documentary, partly experimental.

Klaus Kammerichs, Böll and the rubble of Cologne, 2011, photo collage, in the possession of the Böll Archive, Cologne

Since the beginning of the 2000s, the Kammerichs has turned to photography again. a. with decollages (destroyed advertising), (E) motions (scenes from the metro in Washington), reflections (motifs from Cannes and Nice ) and portrait collages of writers from contemporary exile and migration, to whom he has passages from their work “in the face wrote. Furthermore, in response to the collapse of the Historical Archives of the City of Cologne, a series of Böll collages in which the poet's face merges with old and new ruins. This series in October 2017 was given to the Heinrich Böll Archive of the City of Cologne as a gift.

From 2008 to 2016, Klaus Kammerichs and Eva Weissweiler gave photo and writing courses for the mentally ill at the LVR Clinic in Cologne , which were accompanied by several exhibitions and publications.

Awards

  • 1959: January: Discovery of the Month by New York magazine Modern Photography
  • 1994: David Octavius ​​Hill Medal from the German Photographic Academy in Leinfelden-Echterdingen

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Literature (selection)

  • Michel Auer: Encyclopédie Internationale des Photographes de 1839 à nos Jours. Hernance: Ed. Caméra Obscura, Geneva 1985, ISBN 2-903671-04-4 .
  • Klaus Franken (ed.): Youth sees time. Friedebeul & Koenen, Essen 1954.
  • Gottfried Jäger: Imaging Photography. Photography - light graphics - light painting. Origins, concepts and specifics of an art form. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1988, ISBN 4-7701-1860-X .
  • Gottfried Jäger, Karl Martin Holzhäuser: Generative photography. Theoretical foundation, compendium and examples of photographic image design. Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg 1975, ISBN 3-473-61555-2 . * Jörg Krichbaum: Lexicon of Photographers. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-596 26418-9 .
  • Reinhold Mißelbeck (Ed.): Prestel-Lexicon of Photographers. Prestel Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-7913-2529-9 .
  • Peter Sager: New Forms of Realism. Art between illusion and reality. DuMont, Cologne 1973, ISBN 3-77010656-3 .
  • Hugo Schöttle: Dumonts Lexicon of Photography. DuMont, Cologne 1978, ISBN 978-3-770109 44-9 .
  • Lilli Weissweiler: The photo and film sculptures by Klaus Kammerichs. Master's thesis Frankfurt am Main 2003.

Web links

Commons : Klaus Kammerichs  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leo Fritz Gruber: Photokina 1954 . Cologne 1954.
  2. ^ Discovery of the Month . In: Modern Photography . New York 1959, p. 90, 100 .
  3. ↑ Peter Sager: New Forms of Realism. Art between illusion and reality. DuMont, Cologne 1973, p. 123.
  4. ↑ Klaus Kammerichs: photo sculptures - drawings . Ed .: Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia. Düsseldorf 1975.
  5. ^ Klaus Kammerichs: Klaus Kammerichs: exhibition, Laforet Museum Harajuku, Tokyo . Wave (FM Japan Limited), Tokyo 1992.
  6. ^ Trierischer Volksfreund . May 6, 2008.
  7. ↑ Klaus Kammerichs: Five columns for a red indian: Old world - new world . Dittrich, Cologne 1992, ISBN 978-3-920862-03-3 .
  8. ^ Laurent Roosens and Luc Salu: History of Photography . Vol. 4. Mansell, London / New York 1999, ISBN 0-7201-2354-2 , pp. 166 .
  9. ↑ Klaus Kammerichs: Captions. Photographs from 1948 - 1954 . Ed .: Eva Weissweiler. Free Pen Verlag, Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-945177-18-1 .
  10. ↑ K. Sch .: The layered man . In: NRZ . Düsseldorf November 12th 1971.
personal data
SURNAME Kammerichs, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor, photographer and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Iserlohn