Haus am Kleistpark, the Schöneberg district exhibition space, is presenting a retrospective devoted to the German photographer Christa Mayer. Nearly 150 photographs spread across three rooms reveal less a career than a temperament.
Christa Mayer (1945) is a singular figure in the landscape of German photography. Trained at the Michael Schmidt’s Werkstatt für Photographie in Kreuzberg in the 1980s, she was one of the rare women to establish herself in this seminal space, where a certain idea of authorial photography in West Germany was then taking shape. Yet what distinguishes her work is not simply a question of gender or generation: it is a stance.
A psychologist by training, she worked for more than twenty years in the long-term psychiatric ward of a Berlin clinic. This is where her series Abwesende (The Absent, 1979-1996) and Heilende (Healers, 1982-1989) originated. These portraits of patients, caregivers, and therapists from diverse backgrounds are neither clinical documentary nor compassionate staging. Mayer coined for them the term “dialogic portraits”: images born of mutual attention, of a relationship rather than a detached, superior gaze. “If one is lucky, a real encounter and a real understanding take place,” she says.
This logic finds its most striking form in the Videospiegel (Video Mirror) and the series Blauer Mann (1990), drawn from Abwesende II. M. St., a former patient suffering from persecutory delusions and convinced he was a “monster,” had himself asked to be filmed in order to reassure himself of his own humanity. He sees his image in real time on a screen, reacts to his portraits, and records his thoughts in writing. The series is hung on the wall like a constellation: twelve bluish photographs, each topped by a handwritten text, faces caught in states of extreme intensity.
Also on view are the portraits of Mrs. P., who lived for forty years in the clinic and whom Mayer accompanied for eighteen years. Her text, Die Pfingstrose Gottes (God’s Peony), is displayed directly on the exhibition wall, typeset with a particular spacing that gives each word time to exist. Through images and words, one comes close to her, perhaps even more closely than one might wish.
At a time when representations of the psychiatric world oscillate between sensationalism and miserabilism, Mayer chooses dignity. This gaze extends to healers from every culture, from Maya shamans of Yucatán to psychoanalysts in New York. During her stay in New York in 1987, Mayer collaborated with the painter Andreas Senser: some prints were reworked by him in graphite or ink, turning these photographs into genuine collaborative works. Collaboration is very present, as with her patient Silvia S., whom she accompanied on a trip in 1990 and who stages herself in a wheat field: her poses express both the dream of a life as a model and the anger, the mourning for what will never happen.
Her images of Istanbul testify to a sense of urban theater: a boy thrown backward by a dog jumping on him, their two shadows cast on the wall, captured in the instant. In her later landscapes, forests, coasts, and the light of California, La Gomera, or India, nature is treated as a surface of projection. These landscapes sometimes bring forth paths, stairways leading toward the unknown. Two self-portraits taken in Göreme, in Cappadocia (1992), crystallize this shift: Mayer depicts herself nude, folded into a rocky cavity, her hair wrapped in cloth, her body merging with the rock to the point of becoming almost indistinguishable from it. The second portrait was later enhanced with colored paint. The landscape absorbs and prolongs this, shifting the question that structures the whole body of work: what do we see in what remains silent?
Noémie de Bellaigue
Christa Meyer’s retrospective is on view at Haus am Kleistpark through April 6, 2026.
Haus am Kleistpark
10823 Berlin, Germany
