Virginia Heckert

This is the first book on the history, influences and impact of the Werkstatt f r Photography (Photography Workshop), founded by the Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt at the Volkshochschule Kreuzberg in 1976. In the midst of the Cold War, the Werkstatt initiated a democratic field of experimentation beyond the pale of traditional vocational and political-institutional standards. Those same years witnessed the establishment of infrastructures in West Germany that paved the way for the emancipation of photography as an art form: Documenta 6 (1977), the first photo galleries and photography journals and a number of pathbreaking exhibitions. Berlin, Hanover and Essen played important roles in that process. This book presents the story of German photography in the 1970s and '80s, its international ties, its protagonists and its networks.

Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy's Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence. Spanning the photographer's earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum's extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.