Nomi Baumgartl

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Nomi Baumgartl (born 1950 ) is a German photographer . She became known as an internationally sought-after fashion and portrait photographer in the 1980s and 1990s . A serious car accident interrupted her career. Since then she has dedicated her photo art projects to the connection between humans, animals and nature. Her works are represented in well-known collections and museums.

life and work

biography

Nomi Baumgartl spent her childhood in the Donau-Ries district . She grew up as the eldest sister of two siblings, her youngest brother is George Baumgartl . She started taking photos at the age of 21. She submitted her first work entitled Society 1972 , a portrait of Turkish migrants in Düsseldorf, to a competition at the Photokina in Cologne and won first prize. She studied visual communication in Düsseldorf and learned classic analog photography . At the beginning of her career, her focus was on reporting . She published in Geo , Stern , Timeand Life . Her best-known photographs from this period include portraits, including those of Arthur Rubinstein , Joseph Beuys , Horst Janssen , Andreas Feininger , Jane Goodall and Pope Johannes Paul II. The fashion world became aware of her in the early 1990s. On behalf of international designers, she photographed fashion productions with supermodels . She was considered a shooting star in fashion photography. Vanity Fair , Vogue and others a. published their pictures. During this time she lived mostly in New York.

In 1996 she lost her long-term memory in a serious car accident and suffered paralysis of the eye muscles. After years of rehabilitation, she tried to find her way back to her life as a fashion photographer, but the strenuous, large studio productions were too much for her. A dolphin therapy at John Lilly in Hawaii improved their health. She had to relearn how to see and take photos “with eyes that from then on saw the depths of things instead of just lingering on the surface”. It was now the eyes of people and animals that she focused on with her camera, like the isolated pupil of a wild dolphin in 1999. "In Baumgartl's work they are always like doors - like openings into areas that may once have been called the soul." (Ralf Hanselle on the Summertime exhibition ) Since then she has conceived her own large-scale photo art projects under the motto "Art of Seeing" ( German  art of seeing ).

Nomi Baumgartl mainly takes analogue photographs. Digitally , she cannot yet achieve the results she wants. For her, photography is a work of consciousness; she describes her pictures as “realized visions” with which she wants to “give nature more weight”. They are a homage to creation. “Even in my life that has been given again, I am a photographer. The big difference, however, is that I have gained a different awareness of the great interrelationships of existence. "

She lived and worked as a freelance photographer in Munich and is now (2017) based in Murnau am Staffelsee . Works by Nomi Baumgartl are represented in the Bibliothèque nationale de France , the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Berlin gallery Camera Work .

Photo art projects

In 2000 and 2001 she organized underwater productions off the Bahamas with Tatjana Patitz , who swam with dolphins. She created “melancholy, out of time” black and white photographs with which she supported the organization Dolphin Aid , which enables children with disabilities to receive dolphin therapies. In 2003 she traveled to California to photograph Chris Gallucci, a former biker who shared his everyday life with an African bull elephant after a life crisis, and described this friendship in an illustrated book. With these photos she wanted to express her appreciation for people and animals.

Since 2009 she has been working on the melting of ice in the Arctic and the Alps . During a trip to East Greenland in 2012, she began to capture the light of the polar night with her camera. She initiated the photo and film project Stella Polaris * Ulloriarsuaq - The shining memory of the earth . The North Star , Latin: Stella Polaris , in the language of the Inuit Greenland Ulloriarsuaq , gave the project its name. In 2012 and 2013 she realized it together with the German photographer Sven Nieder , the Berlin director Yatri N. Niehaus and the Greenlandic photographer Laali Lyberth , accompanied by the Inuit Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq as a spiritual mentor. Using long exposures, she created light paintings of the melting ice. Greenlanders who took part in the project played a special role as “light ambassadors”. During the long polar nights, they used flashlights to illuminate the motifs “which stand out from the surroundings like shining islands”. The pictures show the beauty of the eternal ice and at the same time document the disappearance of the icebergs as a result of climate change, to which the project draws attention with aesthetic means. Original photographs hang in the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles, where the first exhibition with 30 large-format images took place in 2014 and was shown again in Munich in 2015. as well as in 2016 in the Museum Industriekultur (Nuremberg) and 2017 in the Katuaq in Nuuk .

In 2016 she started her photo art and alpine protection project Eagle Wings in collaboration with the Earth Observation Center and the environmental research station Schneefernerhaus . The basic idea of ​​the project is to stage an image dialogue between the gaze of a golden eagle , which uses a special 360-degree camera attached to its back to provide film and photo recordings of the dwindling alpine glaciers, and the satellite images from space and Nomi Baumgartl's human perspective on nature.

Publications (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The star girl. The photographer Nomi Baumgartl. In: BR , February 27, 2015.
  2. ↑ Biography - IMDb
  3. ↑ a b c d Christina Warta: Visions of Creation. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 17, 2010.
  4. ↑ a b c Ralf Hanselle on the exhibition: Nomi Baumgartl. "Summertime". Galerie Johanna Breede Photokunst , Berlin, 11 July to 22 September 2017. In: Photography Now , 2017.
  5. ↑ Nomi Baumgartl. "Summertime". In: focus. Magazine for Photography , 2017, No. 2, p. 34, (PDF; 9.5 MB).
  6. ↑ Tatjana Patitz - who dances with the dolphin. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , March 27, 2008.
  7. ↑ Sabine Tesche: My friend, the elephant. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , March 3, 2007.
  8. ↑ a b c Exhibition: Stella Polaris * Ulloriarsuaq - The shining memory of the earth. In: Museum of Industrial Culture in Nuremberg , Museums of the City of Nuremberg 2016/2017. Text by Simon Schwarzer from: LFI - Leica Photography International , 2016, No. 2.
  9. ↑ Shining ice. In: Bild der Wissenschaft , May 22, 2015, with photo gallery.
  10. ↑ Stella Polaris * Ulloriarsuaq. In: Leica Gallery Los Angeles , 2014.
  11. ↑ Evelyn Vogel: Star Conference. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 20, 2015.
  12. ↑ Stella Polaris * Ulloriarsuaq - The shining memory of the earth. In: Ice Wisdom , exhibition, Nuuk, Greenland, March 9 - March 30, 2017 and Stella Polaris * Ulloriarsuaq. In: Greenland today , September 18, 2017.
  13. ↑ Transmission text: Unique photo project about glaciers. From a real bird's eye view. In: BR TV , Abendschau - The South , November 8, 2016.
  14. ^ Reviews by Wolfgang Koeppen : Ich?
personal data
SURNAME Baumgartl, Nomi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1950