A Tribute to F.C. Gundlach: Photographer and Collector

In the rooms of Christie's Paris
November 3rd to 8th, 2018

F.C. Gundlach encountered Paris in the early 1950s. A breathless, restless metropolis and a magnet for cultural figures from around the world. For the network of urban bohemians, street cafés like the "Flore" were meeting places and centers of literary and philosophical exchange. The young photographer F.C. Gundlach found his subject matter in the city, amidst bistros and boulevards, and among the protagonists of the cultural scene. The sophisticated metropolis was, of course, also a fashion capital, and Parisian haute couture became formative for him. Here, F.C. Gundlach found the subject of his success: fashion photography. In 1952, F.C. Gundlach photographed "Dior in Paris" for the magazine Elegante Welt . Since then, the names of the great Parisian fashion houses have appeared as a matter of course in the collections photographed by F.C. Gundlach: Chanel, Jacques Fath, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, and many others.

F.C. Gundlach's idols, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, also came to Paris for the major fashion shows. As early as the 1940s, Avedon photographed Parisian couture collections for American fashion magazines. It was precisely these fashion spreads that inspired F.C. Gundlach, as a young man in Stuttgart's America House, to enthusiastically tear pages out of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.

F.C. Gundlach quickly developed his own visual language, capturing fashion and social change over the next four decades and creating an enormous body of photographic work. As a commissioned photographer, his final product was the printed image in the editorial fashion sections of magazines. His photographs fulfilled his self-defined aesthetic standard of "interpreting the line of a new fashion in its visual representation."

F.C. Gundlach has been collecting photography since the 1960s and has assembled one of the most important private collections in Germany. It encompasses works dating from 1844 to the present day and includes photographers of international renown, among whom, besides Avedon and Penn, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, Wols, William Klein, Walde Huth-Schmölz, Guy Bourdin, and Melvin Sokolsky are represented here. They offer a glimpse into the photographer's sources of inspiration.

F.C. Gundlach says: "Collecting is a creative act and a way of self-discovery. Focused on a style or theme, the collection is a personal summary." One of his collecting focuses is fashion photography as a visualization of the zeitgeist, as it manifests itself in pose, gesture, facial expression and clothing – just as F.C. Gundlach has made it his mission in his own work.

When prêt-à-porter fashion overtook haute couture in Paris, F.C. Gundlach responded with fashion reports whose staging was characterized by spontaneity and narrative elements, while also reflecting the emancipation of women in the 1960s.

The city becomes a backdrop for him, as in the works of the "Bubble Series," which Melvin Sokolsky shot for Harper's Bazaar in Paris in 1963, and with which he particularly succinctly commented on the photographic act of staging fashion in space. This is precisely an aspect of the craft that F.C. Gundlach mastered: whether in Paris, Egypt, or other locations around the world – in the skillful composition of model and background, his photography is characterized by the vivid connection between fashion content and design.

Christie's Paris
9 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris
Saturday, November 3rd to Thursday, November 8th, 2018 (closed on Sunday): 10 am - 6 pm