Look here! Toni Schneiders

Retrospective

Singen Art Museum
July 3 to September 18, 2022

Toni Schneiders is one of Germany's most influential photographers after 1945. With his subtle and insightful photographs, he made a crucial contribution to expanding the visual language of the photographic avant-garde of the 1950s. As a co-founder of the photographers' group "fotoform" in 1949 and as part of the "subjective photography" movement from 1952 onward, he developed a distinctive visual aesthetic that, while maintaining a connection to reality, allowed ample space for individual expression and autonomous pictorial reality. Toni Schneiders also applied this emphasis on formal qualities and means to his travel photographs from around the world. With the liberation of photographic expression, Toni Schneiders and his contemporaries established a postwar tradition that continues to this day.

In 2006, the Singen Art Museum presented the last major exhibition of the camera master's work during his lifetime. Now, following the acquisition and processing of Toni Schneiders' extensive archive and estate at the F.C. Gundlach Foundation in Hamburg, the two partner institutions are dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the photographer, who lived on Lake Constance from 1952 until his death. This retrospective rediscovers him as a "photoformer," as a portraitist, and as a travel and landscape photographer. This retrospective was made possible by the collaboration of the photographer's daughter, Ulrike Schneiders, whose knowledge of his work proved invaluable in the development of the exhibition and accompanying book. It was also made possible by the scholarly expertise of Sebastian Lux and Franziska Mecklenburg of the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, who curated the exhibition in collaboration with Christoph Bauer of the Singen Art Museum. Many of Toni Schneiders' black-and-white photographs have long since become classics of modern photography. Furthermore, the current exhibition includes, for the first time, previously unpublished images from his negative archive.

A connection to reality and a creative impulse – with this dual ambition, Toni Schneiders occupies a mediating position between objective, documentary representation and formal creation. "Simple, clear, and true," according to Schneiders, is what a timelessly valid photograph should be. Alongside his formal studies, the human figure and travel photography emerge as two central lines of development in his oeuvre. While not exclusively, the photographs from the "fotoform" period are characterized primarily by the focused capture of subjectively observed objects and details, simultaneously condensing them into pictorial form. For his precisely composed photographs, he found the beauty of graphic form in the simple things of nature, in the landscape, and in people's everyday lives. With an unconditionally photographic eye, he selected image sections, emphasized lines, contours, and structures, and worked sensitively with available light. In his immediate surroundings in the Alpine foothills and on travels around the world, Schneiders captured striking moments of reality and life, whose protagonist could be a person, an object, or a landscape. Despite the rigor of his visual aesthetics, his subjects always reveal the photographer's empathy. With humor and sensitivity, he placed his life's work in a human perspective. Schneiders decisively explored the potential of photography; pointed tonal gradations from the highest highlight to the deepest shadow, resolute post-processing in the darkroom, and high-contrast prints were all part of his repertoire. However, unlike some other proponents of "subjective photography," Schneiders rejected elaborate arrangements or staging, surreal distortions, darkroom experiments, and abstract photography. From the 1950s onward, Toni Schneiders created a new image of the Lake Constance region and the Alpine foothills, not only with his individual photographs but also with his photo series for illustrated books. The burgeoning tourism industry and the boom in the publishing and magazine market opened up a wealth of opportunities for the auteur photographer.

Toni Schneiders' companion Peter Keetman, with whom he shared a decades-long friendship and a constant exchange on all matters of photography, described Schneiders' attitude in 1999 as follows: "Toni Schneiders' heartwarming way of dealing with people stood and stands in contrast to his reserved modesty. As far as his own work is concerned, when he takes something on and begins it, the result is – simply put – photographic chamber music."

Singen Art Museum
Ekkehardstraße 10
78224 Singen
077 3185271
kunstmuseum@singen.de

Opening hours
Tuesday to Friday 2 pm – 6 pm
Saturday to Sunday 11am – 5pm