Nadine Dinter PR is an owner-managed agency for media relations, PR consulting, and art administration. With its special focus on photography, Nadine Dinter PR supports cultural institutions in Germany and beyond, including museums, galleries, foundations, festivals, and private collections. The Berlin-based agency also works across a variety of sectors in the fields of contemporary art, lifestyle, and art & commerce.
Gerhard Kassner. HOLLYWOOD Stars at the Berlinale
Hollywood is a brand and a myth, for decades an unparalleled dream machine – and not only when the Oscars are awarded in spring. About a hundred years ago, the Ufa in Berlin held a comparable position and power. After the Second World War, the same was true for the Cinecittà in Rome, which served as a film production site and a residence for actors and directors. Every year, the major European film festivals create even more hype around the medium of film with their various prizes – the Golden and Silver Bears, Palms, or Lions, depending on the city.
The Berlinale, of course, is regularly attended by numerous Hollywood celebrities. We have all been there – some of us even on the red carpet – but none of us has looked into the eyes of all the film stars in Berlin in recent years – with two exceptions: Dieter Kosslik, the festival’s longtime former director, and Gerhard Kassner. In 2003, the Berlinale management commissioned Kassner to officially photograph participating actors, directors, jurors, producers, and other important film business figures. For nearly 20 years, Kassner took portraits of Hollywood stars in a small improvised studio. He had just a few minutes for each shot and sometimes pesky or nervous agents breathing down his neck before the stars moved on to their press conferences and photo calls.
Compared to those typical event shots, Kassner’s portraits reveal a sense of intimacy with and empathy for his subject. The face is as much an expression of a person’s individuality as their gestures, which are included sparingly but pointedly in these images. Gerhard Kassner broke through the grand illusions that cinema commonly creates to capture a direct person-to-person encounter. In some of his photos, he succeeds in taking us behind the facade of professional coolness or arrogance – transforming those who often seem unapproachable by humanizing them.

HOLLYWOOD
On 2 June 2022, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will open its new exhibition “HOLLYWOOD” featuring works by Eve Arnold, Anton Corbijn, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Michael Dressel, George Hoyningen-Huene, Jens Liebchen, Ruth Harriet Louise, Inge Morath, Helmut Newton, Steve Schapiro, Julius Shulman, Alice Springs, and Larry Sultan. Photographs by George Hurrell and publications by Annie Leibovitz and Ed Ruscha will also be on view in glass displays.
Helmut Newton is always the point of departure and reference for group exhibitions like this one. His photographic works often include references to film and even quote specific scenes, such as by Alfred Hitchcock or the French Nouvelle Vague. Starting in the 1960s, some of his fashion photographs seem cinematic in their staging, while from the 1970s onward, some of his portraits look like artful film stills. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Newton photographed actors at the Cannes Film Festival and fashion on the Croisette.
In addition to those images by Newton, this new group exhibition features 13 photographers and their interpretations of Hollywood, presented as usual in larger groups of works. The main exhibition space is dedicated to the medium of film and the Hollywood system. It features portraits of actors from Hollywood’s early years by Ruth Harriet Louise and George Hoyningen-Huene, as well as later film stills and on-set photographs by Steve Schapiro and several Magnum photographers, including Eve Arnold and Inge Morath, who documented the 1960 production of the John Huston film, Misfits.
A glass display presents an extensive portfolio of photographs by George Hurrell that Helmut Newton owned, along with some later works by Hurrell, who replaced Ruth Harriet Louise in 1930 as the most important Hollywood portraitist for the major film studios. Elsewhere in the same room hang five large-format color photographs from Larry Sultan’s series The Valley, a study of the porn film industry near Hollywood – the largest of its kind and, in a sense, the equally lucrative dark side of the dazzling world of glamour. Gracing the walls of another part of the space are five large, minimalistic black-and-white portraits shot by Anton Corbijn in Los Angeles, from Clint Eastwood to Tom Waits. A further display case holds Annie Leibovitz’s famous Hollywood portraits, which she shoots every year for Vanity Fair. The Oscar winners depicted in panoramic group portraits appear on gatefold covers of the magazine.
As a whole, this room traces a historical arc over an entire century – from the early star portraits of the 1920s, which set a precedent, to present-day Hollywood, and from vintage prints of various sizes to magazine reproductions.
In the back exhibition room, the focus is on the city of Los Angeles. Julius Shulman’s architectural photographs showcase legendary mansions in Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills. These architectural icons of L.A. modernism were often the home of film stars and producers and occasionally served as film sets. Appearing in sharp contrast are Michael Dressel’s striking, sometimes unsparing portraits of the failed and disillusioned and even Hollywood tourists. These fleeting encounters are captivating in their spontaneity and situational composition. Jens Liebchen began work on his color series L.A. Crossing in 2010 as part of the “La Brea Matrix” project initiated by Markus Schaden, aiming to trace the footsteps of Steven Shore. From the window of his rental car, Liebchen photographed what at first glance seems to be unspectacular street scenes. Viewed as a series, however, the images unfold into a compassionate sociological study. On the opposite wall is Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Hustler series from the 1990s, portraits of male prostitutes around Santa Monica Boulevard. Each photograph’s title includes the sitter’s name, place of origin, and hourly rate – the latter in this case referring to the fee for the photograph. Flipped open in the central display case, Ed Ruscha’s legendary 1966 accordion-fold leporello, Every Building at the Sunset Strip provides an architectural and social backdrop for the other photographers’ later images of the same sites and street corners, which hang on the walls in this exhibition space.
A different kind of street photography is on view in June’s Room, which Alice Springs shot on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood in 1984. The images capture the music-based counterculture of punks and mods and other style-conscious individualists who transformed the streets into a stage as if life were a casting show.

Andy Summers. A Certain Strangeness
The Ernst Leitz Museum Wetzlar will present A Certain Strangeness, an extensive retrospective of photographer and musician Andy Summers, from 28 July to 5 October 2022.
The artist Andy Summers (*1942, Blackpool, UK) is a true multi-talent who has made his passion for music and photography his profession for more than 40 years. While in his teens, Summers earned his pocket money as a beach photographer; in 1979, he took up photography again when he went on tour with his band The Police. Summers captured the delirious energy of concertgoers, the vibrant cities of the tour schedule, and the nighttime excursions. His photos quickly became a “cool visual counterpart to the music.”
In this exhibition, we accompany the interdisciplinary artist on his journeys from the Altiplano in Bolivia to the narrow streets of Tokyo. With a keen eye for surrealistic details, he captures magical moments that recede into the night or vanish in the blink of an eye. Summers brings us closer to his vision with a dense visual diary spanning minimalistic compositions and heightened narratives in black and white.
The second featured series takes us up close and personal with the legendary band The Police. Summers joined it as a guitarist in 1977 and, together with Sting and Stewart Copeland, made music history as one of the most influential bands of the British New Wave. Summers takes us on stage and behind the scenes, aboard the tour bus with the landscape rushing by and enjoying candid moments of respite between gigs.
In addition to his autobiographical film, Can’t Stand Losing You, Andy Summers has published four photography books – Throb (1983), Light Strings (2004), I’ll Be Watching You (2007), and Desirer Walks the Street (2009) – as well as the memoir One Train Later (2006), and the short story collection Fretted and Moaning (2021).
After The Police disbanded in 2008, Summers continued his solo career. His Leica M4-2, which was recommended to him by his close friend Ralph Gibson, remains his constant companion.
Parallel to his photography exhibitions planned throughout Europe, Andy Summers will tour Europe in 2022/2023 with his multimedia show Harmonics of the Night.

Photographs by Jamel Shabazz: 1980 – 1989
Jamel Shabazz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. At the young age of fifteen, he picked up his first camera and started his photographic journey. Since the early 1980s, Shabazz has captured the energy of street life in New York, making iconic images of community, joy, and style. The upcoming solo show Photographs by Jamel Shabazz: 1980–1989 brings together mostly unseen works from this era. Shabazz was one of the first photographers to document the emerging youth culture, along with his own experiences, in neighborhoods across East Flatbush, Bedford-Stuyvesant, downtown Brooklyn, up to Times Square. Capturing a time long gone from our collective culture and a wide range of social conditions, Shabazz made the streets of New York and the city's subway system the backdrop for many of his iconic photographs.
Shabazz has exhibited his homegrown approach to portraiture everywhere from the Rockefeller Plaza in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His work is part of the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian's
National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His books Back in the Days and A Time Before Crack are considered classics for their articulation of a visual vernacular and continue to inspire young generations of photographers.

Thomas Hoepker – Image Maker
From April 1 to July 17, 2022, the Ernst Leitz Museum Wetzlar is presenting Thomas Hoepker – Image Maker, a comprehensive retrospective of the German Magnum photographer’s work.
Since the sixties, Thomas Hoepker has helped define German photojournalism like few others. Starting as a permanent contributor to major magazines, as a photographer and correspondent, but also as an Art Director and internationally renowned Magnum photographer, he is today considered one of the most important representatives of engaged, empathic photojournalism. Even so, he only ever humbly saw himself as an assignment photographer, an “image maker”; someone who was interested in nothing less than the truth, in the veracity of the moment. Even so, over the many decades of his active life as a photographer, an oeuvre has come together that goes way beyond the context within which it was created, and which is seen as both complex and independent, as well as immensely artistic. Calm, subtle and far removed from sensationalism, many of Hoepker’s visually sensitive motifs have become icons of “concerned photography”, thanks to their precise composition and intense pictorial statements...

2 June 2022, 10 + 11.30 am:
2 June 2022, 7 pm:
2 June 2022, 7 pm:
9 June 2022, 5 -9 pm:
27 July 2022, 7 pm:
2 - 4 September 2022:
2 September 2022, 7 pm:
16 YEARS