Peter Keetman. A Designed World. A Photographic Life's Work

House of Photography Hamburg
November 17, 2015 to February 12, 2016

The work of Peter Keetman (1916–2005) occupies a central place in postwar German photographic modernism. As the exhibition title, "Designed World ," suggests, it brings together two key currents of this period: on the one hand, the modernist drive for form, design, experimentation, and abstraction; on the other, a humanistic worldview and a focus on reconstruction, the city, and nature, down to its most fundamental elements. This major retrospective, organized by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and the Museum Folkwang, demonstrates how these two currents seamlessly merge in Keetman's work.

German history is inextricably linked to Keetman's photography and biography. For the first time, the exhibition presents such a broad range of early works by the young photographer, showcasing the perspective of New Objectivity, photographs from Munich during the Nazi era, and images from the war against the Soviet Union, from which Keetman returned disabled.

In the late 1940s, Keetman shed the old-fashioned atmosphere of his training years in Munich and with Adolf Lazi in Stuttgart. From then on, Keetman belonged to the young, rebellious members 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 represents this new beginning in photography.

The retrospective showcases in detail the fascinating development of German photography in the late 1940s and 1950s. It also reveals how Peter Keetman escaped all formalism by working in many areas of photography – documenting 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 dynamism of the economic miracle era into abstract images.

The exhibition dedicates separate sections to his famous series at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg in 1953 and to the "Vibrations" series – Keetman's magnificent signature in the history of experimental photography. But the fascinating interplay between independent photography and commissioned work is also explored, allowing us to discover a central figure of post-war photography in all his multifaceted glory.

This retrospective is the result of close collaboration between Museum Folkwang and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation. Drawing on the archives of both institutions – the F.C. Gundlach Foundation holds significant portions of Peter Keetman's estate and image rights, while the Museum's Photographic Collection manages the negative archive, a large number of working prints, and early exhibition prints – a comprehensive overview of Peter Keetman's life's work has been compiled.