Werner Bethsold

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Self-portrait by Werner Bethsold

Werner Bethsold (born October 11, 1925 in Berlin ; † January 26, 2019 there ) was a German photographer .

life and work

While attending secondary school, Werner Bethsold was awarded the Abitur in 1942 because he was called up to the Reich Labor Service (RAD). After completing his RAD training in Kucherow (Pomerania) and deploying to repair war damage in Mülheim an der Ruhr , he was recruited into the Wehrmacht in Auxerre , France in autumn 1943 and then began pilot training as a war officer applicant at Schöngarten Air Base near Wroclaw. At the end of the war he was deployed on the Western Front near Euskirchen and was sent to a US Army prisoner-of-war camp in Namur , Liège and Le Havre , where he worked as an interpreter in labor companies.

In autumn 1946 he returned to Berlin in the French sector . He attended a pre-semester for architecture and was a freelancer at the Pedagogical-Psychological Research Center, an institution of the Department of Reeducation of the United States' High Commission in Berlin. There he was involved in the development and testing of new procedures (including the multiple choice system) in intelligence and personality research. He studied graphology with practicing written reviewers and at the Central Institute for Writing Psychology, where he passed the professional examination in 1950 and became an officially recognized graphologist of the Professional Association of German Psychologists through the Magistrate of Greater Berlin . He worked as an appraiser for the Luchterhand publishing house , among others , and worked on committees such as the Landesbildstelle - for example on the psychology of school radio . Together with a homeopathic doctor and iris diagnostician , he founded a psychosomatic department in 1955 and from 1959 looked after people at risk of suicide in the telephone counseling service. From autumn 1963 to March 1964 he was interim manager of the youth hostel of the Inner Mission Wichernheim in Berlin-Moabit .

Afterwards he broke off all previous psychological activities for ideological reasons, drafted scripts for television series for the planned Second German Television, the so-called Adenauer-Fernsehen , earned his money as a night watchman and as a laborer in a company for organizational aids, and from 1966 to 1972 as a Rotaprint specialist for the C. Bolle dairy . Affirmed by the photographer Arno Fischer , Bethsold intensified the work he began in the 1960s as a freelance photographer and photo journalist for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , Hörzu , RIAS , Deutsche Oper , the Berlin city magazines Zitty and tip . Bethsold's work ranged from graphic work for artist brochures and record covers to photo reporting from festivals and opera productions for the German and Swiss press.

From 1979 to the mid-1990s Werner Bethsold dealt with the genre of radio plays. Since he basically did without flash, worked with the given lighting conditions in the studio and proceeded discreetly, he had obtained the rare permission from some directors and actors to be allowed to stay in the recording room even during the recording. His photos show not only actors, but also directors, technicians, authors and musicians in a variety of radio play production situations, never posing or arranged for the camera. His black and white portraits therefore make the concentration and inner tension of the radio play work particularly vivid. His numerous photos from the radio play studios of RIAS, Sender Freies Berlin and, on the advice and mediation of actress Inge Keller , from 1986 onwards from the Funkhaus Nalepastraße document an entire period of German-German radio play history and have been included in many radio play and feature brochures of the public radio .

Dinorah Varsi

In Ronald Steckel's artificial head radio play production The Most Ordinary Was Always the Most Doubtful (SFB 1982) Werner Bethsold can be heard as a contributor alongside Ulrich Gerhardt , Fritz Mikesch and Ursula Weck. In a publication, he interlaced the text of the original manuscript by Ronald Steckel with his photos resulting from the staging process for the radio play co-production BR / RIAS Berlin Die Akademie (director: Ulrich Gerhardt), which was recorded in the RIAS studios and during outdoor recordings in Pilgramsreuth (Rehau) / Upper Franconia and was originally broadcast on September 23, 1979. In 1995, SWF radio play director Hermann Naber invited Bethsold to document the lavish SWF / MDR co-production of Jostein Gaarder's Sofies Welt .

Part of his work (1,700 photos, 6,000 negatives) - primarily photos from radio play productions - has been taken over from the archive of the Berlin Academy of the Arts . There and in Werner Bethsold's private archive there are numerous portraits of authors, visual artists, conductors, composers, musicians, politicians, directors and actors, including Louis Armstrong , Jurek Becker , Cathy Berberian , Luciano Berio , Elisabeth Bergner , Boris Blacher , Christian Brückner , John Cage , Ray Conniff , Miles Davis , Marion Gräfin Dönhoff , Angelica Domröse , Peter Fitz , Ella Fitzgerald , Max Frisch , Erwin Geschonneck , Elke Heidenreich , Wolf Kaiser , Manfred Krug , Reiner Kunze , LaSalle String Quartet , Jutta Lampe , Hermann Lause , Stanisław Lem , Friedrich Luft , Lorin Maazel , Neville Marriner , Yehudi Menuhin , Brigitte Mira , Anne Moody , Branko Samarovski , Armin Mueller-Stahl , Sławomir Mrożek , Götz Naleppa , Wolfgang Neuss , Otto Sander , Hanning Schröder , Giuseppe Sinopoli , Georg Solti , George Tabori , Peter Ustinov , Dinorah Varsi , Gerd Wameling , Richard von Weizsäcker , Ulrich Wildgruber , Israel Yinon .

As part of the so-called urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, Werner Bethsold showed something of the past beauty and the narrowness of his native city. Up to the turn of the millennium, moving means of transport and self-driving cars created images of urban landscapes and people encountered on and on the street under the title Passing by. The stamp designed by Birgit Hogrefe and issued in 2004 for the 100th birthday of the German composer Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling uses a portrait photo of Werner Bethsold.

Werner Bethsold - Werner Bethsold-Wöhrle since 1986 - was the father of four children and lived with his third wife Katharina Wöhrle in Berlin-Hermsdorf .

photos

Publications (selection)

  • 10 years of the Berlin artist program. German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1975.
  • Schöneberg - an area in Berlin. Photos, text: Werner Bethsold, Berlin 1977.
  • Faces of Voices: Radio Play Photographs 1980–1991. Werner Bethsold, Berlin 1995
  • The academy. Radio play by Ronald Steckel, director: Ulrich Gerhardt, complete manuscript with photographs of the staging process, BR / RIAS 1979, publication of the 11th week of the radio play, 28 photos of scenes by Werner Bethsold. Berlin 1997.

Quote

“In the usual radio play photos, you usually see two or more actresses or actors in front of the microphone, placed there by the photographer and asked to look into the lens or to pretend they are busy. The rest is done by the flash, which leaves nothing more than the superficiality of faces or even their distortion. "

- Behind closed doors - as a photographer in the radio play studio. In: Continuum. 6/1993

Web links

Commons : Werner Bethsold  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthias Thalheim: Schwarzlicht - On the death of the photographer Werner Bethsold in: Der Tagesspiegel from January 29, 2019, accessed on February 1, 2019
  2. Photos as a gift - NMZ series music photographers: Werner Bethsold. In: Neue Musikzeitung , April / May 1984.
  3. ^ Matthias Thalheim: Photo: Werner Bethsold - Master shots in the pale studio light. In: Triangel , issue 5/2003, pp. 51 to 53.
  4. ^ Hermann Naber: radio play in pictures - photo exhibition Werner Bethsold. Preface and speech for the presentation of the Academy of the Arts, Hanseatenweg, November 21, 1993 to January 23, 1994.