From the Archives I:
Wolfgang G. Schröter -
The great Color-Internship

LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn

27 April to 26 June 2016

Colour photography! In the 50s it was widely used in photo albums and magazines. Their pale pastel tones still characterize our image of that time. At the same time, however, color was still a broad field of experiments in photography until the 1960s. The photographic industry and professional colour photographers have constantly created new image strategies and achieved spectacular visual results.

Among the most remarkable testimonies of this period are the works of Wolfgang G. Schröter: full-body photograms on giant slide paths, motion studies with color-scaled stroboscopic flash, tube-screen images of electronically modified portrait photographs, telescope images of galaxies and stellar nebulae, which were divided into color areas equidensitometrically - i.e. according to light intensity...

The photographer and lecturer laid down his experiences in 1966 in the internationally acclaimed textbook "Das große Color-Praktikum", the title of which we are now using for a presentation of his extremely colorful, in part almost abstract works from the photographers' archive in the Deutsche Fotothek.

Wolfgang G. Schröter established himself in the GDR in the 1950s as a freelance photo journalist and professional colour photographer. On behalf of internationally operating photo-optical companies such as AFGA/ORWO in Wolfen and Carl Zeiss in Jena, he created avant-garde, aesthetically and technologically outstanding colour photographs. Through his contacts to industry, he had free access to materials and exclusive technical equipment. There were hardly any financial and ideological restrictions on the part of the clients.

Schröter's approach to color, surface and contour in applied and scientific photography - initially analog, since the early 1970s also based on electronic imaging - proves to be a visionary image achievement. He anticipates a media art, the extent of which unfolded its full scope only with the digital revolution around the turn of the millennium.

He uses classic photographic techniques such as the photogram as well as pre-digital electronic image analysis and transfers scientific motif worlds into advertising and art photography.

His colour-photographic works in printed advertising material, magazines and at trade-fair stands correspond to the aesthetics of Western industrial and scientific photography, yet as such find their way into the pictorial canon of artistic photography in the GDR.

With Wolfgang G. Schröter's works from the archives of the Deutsche Fotothek, the exhibition gives us the rare and exciting opportunity to gain an insight into extremely complex processes of image creation, both analogue and electronic. Above all, however, we see a master of early, creative and experimental colour photography at work.