The Photographer F.C. Gundlach
Franz Christian Gundlach, better known as F.C. Gundlach, (* July 16, 1926 in Heinebach, † July 23, 2021 in Hamburg) was a German photographer, gallery owner, collector, university professor, curator, and founder. In September 2003, he was appointed founding director of the House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
His fashion photographs of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which repeatedly addressed social phenomena and current trends in the visual arts, have often become icons, transcending the context in which they were created and finding their way into museums and collections.
From 1946 to 1949, F.C. Gundlach attended the Private Lehranstalt für Moderne Lichtbildkunst under Rolf W. Nehrdich in Kassel. As a freelance photographer, he published primarily theater and film reports in magazines such as Deutsche Illustrierte, Stern, Quick, and Revue from 1949 onward.
His specialization in journalistic-style fashion photography began in 1953 with his work for the Hamburg magazine Film und Frau, for which he mainly photographed the fashion of Berlin fashion designers, Parisian haute couture and portraits of personalities such as Romy Schneider, Hildegard Knef, Dieter Borsche and Jean-Luc Godard.
"As a fashion photographer who uses the recording medium for his productions, the photographer must live, think, and feel entirely in his time. Fashion photographs are always interpretations and productions. They reflect and visualize the zeitgeist of the present and anticipate that of tomorrow. They offer projection surfaces for identification, but also for dreams, wishes, and longings. And yet, fashion photographs often say more about an era than documentary photographs that claim to have depicted reality." (F.C. Gundlach in his speech at the opening of the exhibition FC Gundlach: Das fotografische Werk at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin 2009)
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, F.C. Gundlach undertook fashion and reportage trips to the Near, Middle, and Far East, as well as to Central and South America, for magazines such as Film und Frau , Stern , Annabelle , Twen , and other magazines. From this point on, New York, in particular, became a key focal point for F.C. Gundlach's photographic work. Under an exclusive contract with Brigitte magazine, he subsequently photographed many of the trendsetting fashion pieces until 1989, a total of more than 160 cover photos and over 5,000 pages of the editorial fashion section.
F.C. Gundlach remained active well into old age: as a producer of renowned national and international exhibition projects, promoter of young photographic talents, custodian of extraordinary photographic legacies, and advisor and visionary in the field of photography.
His retrospective solo exhibitions, such as ModeWelten (1985), Die Pose als Körpersprache (1999), Bilder machen Mode (2004), and F.C. Gundlach. Das fotografische Werk (2008), have been shown in numerous museums and galleries in Germany and abroad.
"He is a photographer whose images determine the awareness of fashion's dominant role as a cultural factor in society. Therefore, he rarely depicted the phenomena of fashion in isolation, but rather linked them to the phenomenology of everyday reality and placed them in the sociocultural context from which they ultimately originate. F.C. Gundlach proves himself a photographic artist with a will to style, a master of staging, who has complete control over the photographic image and organizes his subjects in ever-changing formal constellations: a photographer of exceptional aesthetic quality." (Klaus Honnef in his speech at the opening of the exhibition "ModeWelten" at Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn in 1986)
