Ulrich Timmermann

Ulrich Timmermann (* 1952 in Bochum ) is a German journalist , author and photographer .

Life

Ulrich Timmermann studied journalism , sociology and political science at the University of Münster from 1971 to 1977 . From 1979 he was a speaker for the German Youth Photo Prize , which is donated and financed annually by the Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth .

From 1981 he worked as a research associate and senior editor at the Grimme Institute in Marl. In 1996 he moved to WDR . There he directed a. a the editorial group “Neues Radio” and the media magazine of the WDR “Töne, Texte, Bilder” in the radio program WDR 5. Since the beginning of 2007 he was the head of the liaison office of the director Monika Piel . After Tom Buhrow became director, this institution changed its name to "liaison office of the director". Ulrich Timmermann managed this until his retirement in 2016. Timmermann was appointed to the German Society for Photography in 2019 .

Services

At the Grimme Institute , from 1988 to 1995 he was the chief editor of the media magazine “Agenda - Magazine for Media, Education and Culture” (formerly “Further Education & Media”). This magazine brought together the discussion about the future of the media and their role in education in a very eventful phase of media development. From 1992 to 1995 he represented the institute as a personally appointed member of the Board of Trustees of the Voluntary Self-Control Television (FSK).

He also realized for the Grimme Institute a. a a study on the topic of “ Media Pedagogical Atlas North Rhine-Westphalia”, for which he designed a corresponding concept. From 2011 to 2015 Ulrich Timmermann was a representative of the WDR on the supervisory board of the Grimme Institute.

Ulrich Timmermann was a member of the project advisory board “Quality Management in Citizens' Radio ” of the German Radio Academy from 2007 . The state working group “Quality in Citizens' Radio” was formed in 2004 with the aim of improving the quality of the work of the individual radio workshops. This ultimately resulted in the order for the German Radio Academy to develop a "certificate".

For almost two decades, Ulrich Timmermann was the representative of ARD in the German Cultural Council and was the contact person for the German cultural associations for matters relating to public broadcasting. This was u. a for two dossiers on the situation of public broadcasting in the newspaper “ Politik und Kultur ”. The first dossier was published in 2008, when the Internet activities of the public broadcasters were the focus of political disputes (keyword: 12th Amendment to the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty ). The second dossier was created in 2014 against the background of profound changes in the area of ​​the boundaries between broadcasting, telecommunications and network policy and is entitled "Are we still on the air?"

Photography and camera obscura

Ulrich Timmermann was one of the founders of the "Spiekerhof Photo Group" during his studies in Münster. The group dealt intensively with the camera obscura and its visual aesthetic possibilities as a counterpoint to the increasing mass and mechanization of conventional photography.

Ulrich Timmermann stated: “The fascination of the camera obscura begins with amazement”. The amazement at the equipment and its ostensibly simple technology, that pictures with strong expressiveness can be produced at all with a simple cardboard box or wooden box. He vividly describes this moment in his essay Greetings from the Dark : “While everyone remained in total darkness, one of them, accompanied by a devout, tense silence, drilled an approx. Ten millimeter hole in the laboratory door with a hand drill. The Ah's and Oh's after a few seconds of accommodation, when the "outside" flooded in on the stretched white paper, colored, flexible, on the head and with a fairy-tale blurring [...] ”. This initial fascination eventually turned into a lifelong artistic task for Ulrich Timmermann.

From 1975 he carried out experiments with lensless pinhole cameras with the photo group, published texts on them and developed extensive thematic image cycles. From 1977 to 1982 he held a teaching position for "experimental photography" at the University of Osnabrück and also supervised his students in projects on camera obscura beyond their university education.

Together with his colleagues Reinhold Elschot and Detlef Frevert, he designed the picture cycle “Fremde Heimat”, for which they traveled to the Ruhr area and pictorially reflected the critical structural change in this industrial region using the camera obscura. Ulrich Timmermann remembers: “A crane is being picked up with a heavy steel pear attached to its boom, which lies on the floor in the center of the picture. On the right in the background the already gutted furnace house, pipe stumps, arm-thick copper cables, a smoldering fire covers everything with black soot. I crouch on the floor next to the camera for twelve minutes, looking at the scene in silence. Over time, it appears to me as a spherical sphere that arches over the camera, which in turn defines the center of this sphere. Physically I feel the light being sucked in. I know: something is removed, the camera sucks in energy, light. "

Together with Frank Marschall, he also conceived and constructed a social sculpture for the Ruhr area art project “Crossing Borders”: “The first public bimbofon”, an ensemble of self-made instruments that several musicians have to work on at the same time. It consists of wooden drums, metallophones, tubular bells and sound bars.

Ulrich Timmermann later expanded the spectrum of his artistic work. He created spatial installations with the inclusion of the camera obscura, collage techniques from experimental-photographic and scriptural elements and developed encrypted scripts .

Participation in exhibitions

• 1982: the broken look. Photographs with a pinhole camera or camera obscura photographs. , Akzisehaus Osnabrück, Germany
• 1983: Marl Sculpture Museum , Germany
• 1985: Special exhibition The Stranger Look - Camera Obscura , Deutsches Filmmuseum , Frankfurt am Main, Germany
• 1985: Crossing borders: an artist project in the Ruhr area. Exhibition with projects, sketches, drafts, photos and models by visual artists, writers, musicians and mimes , Marl Sculpture Museum, Germany
• 1989: Artistic Techniques IV: Photography. Didactic exhibition accompanying the exhibition The photo as an autonomous image. Experimental design 1839 - 1989 , Kunsthalle Bielefeld , Germany
• 1993: In the meantime - Camera Obscura in dialogue , exhibition in the bunker, Siegen
• 2009: Border crossing 2 , Künstlerzeche Our Fritz 2/3
• 2010: Fremde Heimat - photography with the camera obscura 1979 to 1981 , Grimme Institute, Marl, Germany

literature

• Detlef Frevert, Ulrich Timmermann, Reinhold Elschot: Photography with the pinhole camera. The camera obscura in adult education. In: Further education and media. The magazine from the Adolf Grimme Institute. The media magazine for German adult education . tape 6 , 1981, pp. I-16 .
• Detlef Frevert, Ulrich Timmermann, Reinhold Elschot: Foreign home. Photography with the camera obscura . etc media production, Gelsenkirchen 1982, ISBN 3-923355-00-9 .
• Hilde Fescharek, Dieter Nüß, Ulrich Timmermann, Gerrit Zemlin: The Broken Gaze, pinhole camera photographs . etc media production, Gelsenkirchen 1982.
• Thomas Rother: Crossing borders. An artist project in the Ruhr area - exhibition with projects, sketches, drafts, photos, etc. Models of visual artists, writers, musicians, etc. Mimes . Glaskasten Sculpture Museum, Marl 1985.
• Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Hrsg.): Artistic Techniques IV: Photography. Catalog for the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld . Bielefeld 1989.
• Jochen Dietrich (Ed.): Zwischenzeit - Camera obscura in dialogue . Lindemanns, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-928126-60-1 (This book is also given with the year 1993).
• Burkhard Leismann, Uwe Rüth: Industrial Land Art in the Ruhrland. The artist group B1 and the consequences . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89861-651-5 .
• Olaf Zimmermann, Gabriele Schulz, Stefanie Ernst: The WDR as a cultural actor: aspiration, expectation, reality . German Cultural Council, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-934868-22-9 .

Web links

• PDF of the book “The WDR as a cultural actor: aspiration, expectation, reality”, published on December 3, 2009, 2.49 MB
• Website of the artist with many photographs that were taken with the Camera Oscura
• Photo project Radius 1500 by Ulrich Timmermann in the pixel project Ruhr area

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stefanie Grebe, Peter Holtfreter, Anita Kloten, Tilman Lothspeich, Jan Schmolling, Ulrich Timmermann: Fotofieber. 40 years of the German Youth Photo Prize 1962 to 2002 . German Children and Youth Film Center (KJF), Remscheid 2002.
2. ↑ Annual Report WDR 2008. WDR organization, as of June 1, 2009. (PDF; 9.92 MB) In: wdr.de. June 15, 2009, accessed May 20, 2018 . 
3. ^ Partner of the Grimme Institute. In: grimme-akademie.de. Retrieved May 25, 2018 . 
4. ↑ Expertise Media Pedagogical Atlas North Rhine-Westphalia. In: www.lfm-nrw.de. Retrieved May 22, 2018 . 
5. ^ Grimme Institute: WDR television director Jörg Schönenborn new chairman of the supervisory board. In: Medienkorrespondenz ("Funkkorrespondenz" until 2014). June 26, 2015, accessed on May 20, 2018 (Ulrich Timmermann is named as a member of the Supervisory Board). 
6. ↑ Uschi Wienken: Commitment, enthusiasm, quality ... (No longer available online.) In: conneX. The online magazine for citizen media. March 1, 2007, archived from the original on May 21, 2018 ; accessed on May 20, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ Public broadcasting is an indispensable cornerstone. German cultural council met the chairman of the ARD to exchange views. In: German Associations Forum. September 24, 2013, accessed on May 25, 2018 (Ulrich Timmermann is mentioned as a representative of ARD in the German Cultural Council). 
8. ^ Olaf Zimmermann: Mission Impossible: The public broadcasting. PuK dossier on public broadcasting. (PDF) Deutscher Kulturrat eV, August 25, 2008, accessed on May 22, 2018 . 
9. ↑ Are we still on the air? (PDF; 3.8 MB) In: kulturrat.de. October 17, 2014, accessed May 22, 2018 . 
10. ↑ Gottfried Jäger: Imaging Photography. Photography - light graphics - light painting. Origins, concepts and specifics of an art form . DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 978-3-7701-1860-1 .
11. ^ Ulrich Timmermann: Greetings from the darkness . In: Meanwhile - Camera obscura in dialogue . S. 9 .
12. ^ Ulrich Timmermann: Greetings from the darkness . In: Meanwhile - Camera obscura in dialogue . S. 11 .
13. ^ Frank Marschall, Ulrich Timmermann: The first public bimbofon . In: Crossing borders. An artist project in the Ruhr area - exhibition with projects, sketches, drafts, photos, etc. Models of visual artists, writers, musicians, etc. Mimes . Sculpture Museum Glaskasten, Marl 1985, p. 78-79 .
14. ↑ Akzisehaus. Exhibitions 1982. (No longer available online.) In: www.chronosroma.eu. Formerly in the original ; accessed on May 21, 2018 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
15. ^ Special exhibitions 1985. In: archiv.deutschesfilmmuseum.de. Retrieved May 21, 2018 . 
16. ↑ Border Crossing II. Exhibition from September 12 to October 11, 2009. In: www.kuenstlerzeche.de. Retrieved May 25, 2018 .