Artist F.C. Gundlach

From 1946 to 1949, F.C. Gundlach attended the Private Lehranstalt für Moderne Lichtbildkunst with Rolf W. Nehrdich in Kassel. As a freelance photographer, he published mainly theatre and film reports in magazines such as Deutsche Illustrierte, stern, Quick and Revue from 1949.

His specialisation in fashion photography in the journalistic style began in 1953 with his work for the magazine Film und Frau, published in Hamburg, 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.

For Film und Frau, but also for stern, Annabelle, Twen and other magazines, F.C. Gundlach undertook fashion and reportage trips to the Near, Middle and Far East as well as to Central and South America in the sixties, seventies and eighties. New York in particular was an important hub of F.C. Gundlach's photographic work from this time until his death. Under an exclusive contract with Brigitte magazine, he subsequently photographed many of the trend-setting fashion sections until 1989, a total of more than 160 title covers and over 5,000 pages in the editorial fashion section.

His retrospective solo exhibitions, such as ModeWelten (1985), Die Pose als Körpersprache (1999), Bilder machen Mode (2004) or F.C. Gundlach. Das fotografische Werk (2008) were shown in many museums and galleries at home and abroad.

He is a photographer whose images determine the knowledge of the dominant role of fashion as a cultural social factor. For this reason, he rarely presented the phenomena of fashion in isolation, but rather linked them to the phenomenology of everyday reality and placed them in the socio-cultural context from which they  originated. F.C. Gundlach proves to be a photographic artist with a will to style, as a master of staging, who has photographic techniques and design options at his disposal and organises his objects in ever new formal constellations: as a photographer of extraordinary aesthetic quality.

Klaus Honnef in his speech at the opening of the exhibition ModeWelten,
Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn 1986