Wilfried Bauer
Life and Work

Early on, Bauer, a pupil of Robert Häusser, developed his own expressive and subjective visual language. The loner hides behind the camera, keeping the world at a distance with it. At the same time he makes contact through it, shows soul landscapes in the familiar, loads banality with a deeper sense. The photographer as a poet, as a translator who succeeds in making the invisible visible.

In the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century, Bauer was one of the most sought-after and successful reportage photographers in Germany; his series were printed millions of times. He finds his subjects on countless journeys all over the world for FAZ Magazin, ZEITmagazin, stern, GEO, Merian and SPIEGEL. But he also finds them at the kitchen table, in his immediate surroundings and in the Haseldorfer Marsch.

The partial destruction of his archive by a fire that the photographer set in the apartment before his suicide limits the availability of the motifs. Once again, the question of the future of photographic archives and estates arises. In the case of Wilfried Bauer, the commitment of Dr. Ute Schreiner, makes it possible, that the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, the Martha Pulvermacher Foundation and the Rudolf Augstein Foundation are able to preserve and develop his extraordinary life's work.