From the Archives III: Konrad Helbig – On the Mediterranean

Photographic Explorations 1954-1985

LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn
March 1 to June 10, 2018

For Konrad Helbig, Sicily was a place of longing. Starting from the island, he turned his gaze and his lens to ancient architecture, sculptures and artifacts, to medieval cathedrals and baroque palaces throughout the Mediterranean, as well as to the Mediterranean landscapes and the people who lived and worked amidst the traces of past grandeur. These photographs form the core of his photographic work.

The combination of formal documentation and subjective perspective makes Helbig's photographs independent works of art, whose recognizable visual language transcends mere representations. As a photographer and art historian, he systematically explored the traces of antiquity through diverse cultural landscapes in Sicily and mainland Italy, Turkey, and the Greek islands since 1954.

"Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur"—this aesthetic, described by Winckelmann in the mid-18th century for the classical beauty of Greek sculpture and architecture, served as Konrad Helbig's guide through a landscape shaped by ancient cultures. For months, he traveled from archaeological site to archaeological site and from museum to museum. In hundreds of successful slide presentations, this captivating speaker then conveyed his impressions of the magic of the South to lecture halls and cultural centers in the North. He titled his lectures "In the Force Field of Volcanoes: Stromboli – Vulcano – Lipari , " "A Northerner's Tribute to the Wonders of the Deep South, " or "Sicily – History, Art, and Life in an Island Kingdom ."

"Konrad Helbig's [...] series of images becomes a telling mosaic of Sicily, the center of the Mediterranean, where East and West—Greece, Rome, Arabia, Byzantium—Christianity and Paganism meet," wrote the Ulmer Monatsspiegel in October 1962. His "experiences with the land and its people, his insights into the historical, cultural, and social contexts, and a considerable amount of vivid visual material" were highlighted as outstanding qualities of the photographer, who was often introduced in his lectures as "the best living expert on Sicily."

Like many photographers of the 1950s and 60s, Konrad Helbig worked with two cameras simultaneously, shooting in black and white and in color. The exhibition focuses primarily on Helbig's view of the present, which he always viewed through the lens of art, and also presents his rarely seen color photographs for the first time. Since then, however, the landscapes and, above all, the lived realities of their inhabitants have fundamentally changed, so that Helbig's photographs now appear as testimonies to a bygone, pre-industrial era, which we today tend to view with no less idealization and longing than as Arcadian.

The exhibition series From the Archives

The exhibition series " From the Archives " was created in cooperation between the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, the German Photo Library, and the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn. Each year, it showcases outstanding photographs and photographic perspectives from the extensive photo archives of the three participating institutions. The series began in 2015 with the exhibition " 1945. Cologne and Dresden. Photographs by Hermann Claasen and Richard Peter ," which subsequently traveled to the Dresden City Museum. In 2016, the exhibition "The Great Color Internship. Wolfgang G. Schröter" followed.