BERLIN PHOTO WEEK makes its big comeback this summer – kicking off its third edition on 26 August 2021. The central location will be ARENA Berlin, located directly on the Spree River. This versatile venue has long been a beloved location for art fairs, concerts, summer festivals, and more. BERLIN PHOTO WEEK also features a revised concept this year. Its merger with Messe Berlin and new strategy was announced in autumn 2020: ”With a unique concept – combining photography, video, and art with the latest innovations from the imaging industry – BERLIN PHOTO WEEK brings together creatives, artists, imaging professionals, photo enthusiasts, and celebrities with media companies, leading brands in the imaging industry, and many other brands who appreciate compelling images as an important element of their corporate identity,” says Jens Heithecker, Executive Vice President Messe Berlin Group; IFA Executive Director. This year, the public can once again look forward to numerous top-class exhibitions, exciting talks, and expert discussions on contemporary photography – as well as the popular Funplace, where visitors can discover leading brands such as Panasonic, Leica, WhiteWall, etc. and participate in special interactive brand experiences. One of the exhibition highlights is the exclusive presentation of work by iconic American-Russian photographer, George Hoyningen-Huene, who helped shape international fashion and portrait photography in the early 1920s and 1930s and worked for renowned magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Bazaar. On the initiative of Benjamin Jäger, art director of Berlin Photo Week, and with the kind permission of the George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives, an exquisite selection of iconic photographs will be on view in the exhibition space of Villa Grisebach Berlin. Combining the mediums of photography and film, the second exhibition highlight celebrates the legendary work of famous Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker. His poignant b/w series Mauerkinder (Children of the Wall), which was last shown in 2011, will now be presented at the Schlesischer Busch watchtower, a historically charged building which once overlooked the border strip of the Berlin Wall. This outdoor exhibition will be rounded off by a preview of Hoepker – Beyond Life, a documentary film currently being made about the life and work of Hoepker, directed by Nahuel Lopez. The premiere is planned for late 2021 (distributor: DCM); Berlin Photo Week will host a talk with the film’s protagonists. Furthermore, the camera manufacturer Leica is planning an intergenerational exhibition dedicated to three female Leica photographers, to be shown on the grounds of Arena Berlin. More information will follow shortly.

On 12 May 2021, legendary artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), considered both a saint and a heretic of the art world, would have been 100 years old. In honour of his centenary, the book “Beuys bleibt / Beuys – A Close Up” by esteemed German photographer Michael Ruetz (*1940), will be published in January 2021, shedding new light on the myth of Beuys. In the early 1970s, Michael Ruetz decided to document “the unique phenomenon of Beuys in greater detail than ever before, in the interest of history.” Unlike the many “journalists, photographers, devotees, and art collectors, who all wanted and expected something from Beuys,” Ruetz pursued a different goal. What he was interested in was “detailed observation,” in order to “explore the actual person behind the all too familiar figure of Beuys,” about which there was already exhaustive literature. Ruetz got to know Beuys through mutual friends. “After a while, Beuys invited me of his own accord to accompany him, here and there. [...] The pictures produced on the fly were not intended for publication in the near future, but for posterity and Beuys’s own purposes at the most.” Beuys bleibt / Beuys – A Close Up naturally includes classic portraits of the artist “with his trademark accessories: axe, hat, waistcoat.” Ruetz also produced iconic images of Beuys during his ritualistic performance, Celtic, during which the artist presented “a paraphrase of baptism, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and crucifixion, with the help of snow and ice in a cold concrete basin.” A similarly compelling spectacle was at the boxing match that took place as part of the legendary documenta 5 in 1972 in Kassel, between Joseph Beuys and the young art student, Abraham David Christian. Beuys knew better than anyone else how to stage himself in the limelight and in front of the cameras. But Ruetz’s photographs penetrate this facade and testify to his own sense for the right moment and situations, and his keen eye for people. In these images it is Beuys’s body language that immediately catches the eye. “Whether Beuys acts as a performer, sketches an idea on the dark studio floor with light-colored chalk, pauses with a pencil over his notebook, sits lost in thought, with his mouth half open, with his finger on the piano keys, or looks inside himself; whether he fixes his opponent in a boxing match with a friendly look, is quietly amused, or laughs at the top of his lungs with an empty bottle of soda in his raised hand: [Beuys’s] gestures and facial expressions have a certain fascination, which is not least due to the moment in which [Ruetz] took the photograph.” (Werner Heegewaldt)...

As of 9 October 2020, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin presents its new exhibition “America 1970s/80s” with works by Evelyn Hofer, Sheila Metzner, Joel Meyerowitz, and Helmut Newton. After taking a full-time position with the French edition of Vogue in 1961, Helmut Newton worked in parallel for the fashion magazine’s American edition as well. During this time, he produced images in both Europe and the USA. In New York, Newton delivered his photographs directly to Alexander Liberman, who was the editorial director of American Vogue from the 1960s to the 1990s – not to mention a successful painter, sculptor, and photographer himself. Newton liked the United States and the sense of freedom it offered, and he regularly commuted between the Old and New Worlds. In the 1970s, most of Newton’s American fashion and nude photographs were shot in New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles for various magazines; Newton included some of these in his second photography book, Sleepless Nights (1978). After 1980, when Helmut and June Newton began traveling regularly to Los Angeles to spend the winter months at Chateau Marmont, he made numerous portraits of the “famous and infamous” in and around Hollywood for magazines such as Egoïste, Interview, Vanity Fair, and New Yorker, as well as some nudes for Playboy. The images presented in this exhibition clearly show how Newton’s pictorial language changed during his time in the USA and that portraiture became increasingly important for him...