From the Archives I: Wolfgang G. Schröter – The Great Color Internship

LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn
April 27 to June 26, 2016

Color photography! In the 1950s, it became widespread in photo albums and magazines. Its pale pastel tones still shape our image of this era. At the same time, however, color photography remained a vast field of trials and experiments well into the 1960s. The photographic industry and professional color photographers constantly developed new image strategies and achieved spectacular visual results.

Among the most remarkable works of this period are those of Wolfgang G. Schröter: full-body photograms on enormous slides, motion studies with color-graded stroboscopic flash, CRT monitor images of electronically altered portrait photographs, telescope images of galaxies and nebulae that were equidensitometrically – that is, according to light intensity – decomposed into color areas... The photographer and lecturer documented his experiences in 1966 in the internationally acclaimed textbook *Das große Color-Praktikum* (The Great Color Practical Course ), the title of which we are now using for a presentation of his extremely colorful, sometimes almost abstract works from the Photographers' Archive at the German Photo Library.

Wolfgang G. Schröter established himself in the 1950s as a freelance photojournalist and professional color photographer in East Germany. Commissioned by internationally operating photo-optical companies such as AFGA/ORWO in Wolfen and Carl Zeiss in Jena, he created avant-garde, aesthetically and technologically outstanding color photographs. His industry contacts gave him free access to materials and exclusive technical equipment. Financial and ideological restrictions imposed by his clients were virtually nonexistent.

Schröter's handling of color, surface, and contour in applied and scientific photography—initially analog, and since the early 1970s also based on electronic image generation—proves to be a visionary achievement. He anticipates a media art whose full scope only unfolds with the digital revolution around the turn of the millennium. He employs classic photographic techniques such as the photogram as well as pre-digital electronic image analysis, transferring scientific subject matter into advertising and art photography. His color photographic works in advertising materials, magazines, and at trade fair booths correspond to the aesthetics of Western industrial and scientific photography, yet as such, they find their way into the canon of artistic photography in the GDR.

With the works of Wolfgang G. Schröter from the archives of the German Photo Library, the exhibition offers us the rare and exciting opportunity to gain insight into extremely complex, both analog and electronic, processes of image creation. Above all, we see a master of early, creative, and experimental color photography at work.

An exhibition by the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn in cooperation with the Deutsche Fotothek and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation.