The Permanent Loan of the F.C. Gundlach Foundation in the House of Photography

In his role as founding director of the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, F.C. Gundlach made his private collection, The Image of Man in Photography, available to the museum on permanent loan in 2003. The approximately 9,000 works are housed in a climate-controlled depot.

The Image of Man in Photography

The image of man has been the subject of photographic work from the very beginning. In F.C. Gundlach's collection, particular importance is attached to those photographic works that, beyond their historical status as contemporary documents, open up new perspectives on human dignity and vulnerability.

Photography bears witness in a unique way to the changing view of the human being. A focus of the collection is therefore on photographs that depict the image of man in its external appearance—in fashion, poses, facial expressions, and gestures. The broad definition of fashion as zeitgeist underlying the collection simultaneously requires consideration of those photographs that cannot be interpreted as fashion photography in the narrow sense, but nevertheless reflect contemporary witness.

Another focus within the collection is on images of man by visual artists working with photography, which accentuate the dialogic character of the medium.