The Photographer Peter Keetman
"What photography reveals to me are laws and beauties. The deeper I dive into the matter through photography, the bigger the worlds that open up." (Peter Keetman 1951)
The work of Peter Keetman (1916-2005) occupies a central place in post-war modernist photography in Germany. As the title of the 2016 retrospective Gestaltete Welt expresses, it brings together two central currents: On the one hand, the modernist desire for form, design, experimentation, and abstraction; on the other, a humanistic approach to the world and a focus on reconstruction, the city, and nature, right down to its elementary building blocks. Two currents that seamlessly merge in Keetman's work.
Inextricably linked to Keetman's photography and biography are also German history and the Second World War, from which Keetman returned as an invalid.
At the end of the 1940s, Keetman was one of the young, wild ones of the "fotoform" group, who, inspired by the experiments of the pre-war avant-garde, sought to develop a new language of photography based on formal reduction, the creative power of light, and the subjectivity of individual experience of the world. Together with Otto Steinert and the other members of fotoform, Peter Keetman represented the new dawn of photography.
Peter Keetman escapes any kind of formalism by working in many fields of photography – capturing the reconstruction of Munich, revealing the hidden structures of landscapes and natural phenomena, discovering the reflection of the bigger picture in the smallest details, and translating the dynamics of the economic miracle into abstract images. Particularly noteworthy are his 1953 series at the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg and his Schwingungen – Keetman's magnificent signature in the history of experimental photography. But the exciting interplay of free photography and applied commission is also the subject of his oeuvre, which allows us to discover a central figure in post-war photography in all its facets.
The F.C. Gundlach Foundation holds significant parts of Peter Keetman's estate and image rights, while the Museum Folkwang holds the negative archive, working proofs, and early exhibition prints.
"Orderliness and beauty – Peter Keetman's extensive and diverse life's work unfolds between these two poles. They define his view of the world and determine his visual language: With sensitive, poetic images that are simultaneously graphically rigorous and creatively highly modern, he became one of the groundbreaking photographers of the 1950s and 1960s. His photographic vision, his creative will, with which he structured the image plane as a section of reality into line, surface, and structure, his analytical eye, and his technical precision characterize Keetman's photographs. His formative influence on photography can still be felt today." (Sebastian Lux, in: Peter Keetman – Gestaltete Welt, Steidl Verlag Göttingen 2016)
