F.C. Gundlach, Artist

From 1946 to 1949 F.C. Gundlach attended the Private Lehranstalt für Moderne Lichtbildkunst (Private School for Modern Photography) under Rolf W. Nehrdich in Kassel. As a freelance photographer, he began publishing mainly theatre and film reports in magazines such as Deutsche Illustrierte, Stern, Quick and Revue since 1949.

His specialization in fashion photography in journalistic style began in 1953 with his work for the Hamburg-based magazine Film und Frau, for which he mainly photographed the fashion of Berlin fashion designers, Parisian haute couture and portraits of personalities such as Romy Schneider, Hildegard Knef, Dieter Borsche and Jean-Luc Godard.

For Film und Frau, but also for Stern, Annabelle, Twen and other magazines, F.C. Gundlach made fashion and reportage trips to the Near, Middle and Far East as well as to Central and South America in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. New York in particular has been an important hub of F.C. Gundlach's photographic work from then until the present day. As part of an exclusive contract with the magazine Brigitte starting in 1966, he subsequently photographed many trend-setting fashion pieces until 1989, a total of more than 160 magazine covers and over 5.000 pages in the editorial fashion section.

His retrospective solo exhibitions, such as ModeWelten 1985, Die Pose als Körpersprache 1999, Bilder machen Mode 2004 or F.C. Gundlach. The photographic work 2008 were shown in many museums and galleries in Germany and abroad.

He is a photographer whose images determine the knowledge of the dominant role of fashion as a cultural social factor. For this reason, he rarely presented the phenomena of fashion in isolation, but rather linked them to the phenomenology of everyday reality and placed them in the socio-cultural context from which they  originated. F.C. Gundlach proves to be a photographic artist with a will to style, as a master of staging, who has photographic techniques and design options at his disposal and organises his objects in ever new formal constellations: as a photographer of extraordinary aesthetic quality.

Klaus Honnef in his speech at the opening of the exhibition ModeWelten,
Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn 1986