Menü

F.C. Gundlach - ALL EYES ON PARIS


Dear Photography


17 July to August 2016


In honour of F.C. Gundlach, DEAR Photography presents a show on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Paris has been a city which has been an important address, place of inspiration and starting point for numerous fashion shootings throughout F.C. Gundlachs life.

On October 7, 1950, the photographer crossed the French border for the first time with the yearning for Paris: melancholic atmospheric images with strong chiaroscuro contrasts as known from the film aesthetics of Poetic Realism and Film noir of the 1940s are the result. Numerous night shots remind us of Brassaïs Paris de nuit. "Paris...", says F.C. Gundlach "... "I took my picture of myself."

The canon of motifs includes a couple on the quay of the Seine, a walker in the evening mist and the bistro at dusk. In 1951 F.C. Gundlach also had his first solo exhibition in the Librairie Jean Robert in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. After the Second World War the city quickly became a centre for art and literature, film and fashion again. F.C. Gundlach meets the protagonists of the cultural metropole: Yves Montand with his wife Simone Signoret, Gérard Philipe, Jean Cocteau, Jaques Hébertot and Jean Marais.

The increasing number of visits to Paris by F.C. Gundlach finally sensitized him to the realm of fashion. The names of the great Paris fashion houses can be found in the collections photographed by F.C. Gundlach in the following years: Chanel, Jacques Fath, Pierre Balmain and Cardin. In 1947 Christian Dior launched the first collection of his fashion house, in 1952 F.C. Gundlach took photos for Die Elegante Welt "Dior in Paris".

After all, the Prêt à Porter fashion replaced the haute couture. F.C. Gundlach reacts with fashion reports whose stagings are highly influenced by spontaneity and narrative elements: Gitta Schilling sometimes relaxed, then again mysteriously, in a bar under the gaze of the male visitors, dancing in the streets of Paris with a fanned out coat or at the Tête à tête in the spotlight of the Pont Alexandre III.

The narration of Paris as a city of love is also followed by a photo report, which Karin Mossberg and Karl Fehrmann catches on the run in front of the metro and shows them at an advanced hour in the restaurant, he finally kneeling before her, she in a Dior pearl-embroidered wedding dress. F.C. Gundlach Paris`is artfully staged between illusion and perception.

Dear Photography Hamburg
Kleine Reichenstr. 1
20457 Hamburg