“I am a Berliner” – with these words, John F. Kennedy made history. No record of the young charismatic president is more celebrated, cheered harder, been cited more often than this. In June 1963, Kennedy came to the Federal Republic of Germany. Cologne, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Berlin were on the agenda of a journey that would be a triumphal trip. Since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 the Berlin people had been waiting for a sign of solidarity. Well there it was: In the form of the most powerful man in the world, whose presence in the “front-line city,” was cheered by not less than two million flag waving people . Kennedy’s visit marked the high point of American enthusiasm in West Germany. This visit was a political, but also a media event and was accompanied by the 28-year-old Ulrich Mack for the German magazine Quick. Mack’s black and white reportage are known for its artisanal excellence, a sense of decisive moments for grand gestures, but also a sensitive look at the goings-on at the edge, the more so on the well-staged performances of politicians – Kennedy, Adenauer, Brandt – the emotional side of the visit reflects. No photographer, that’s for sure, documented the state visit as completely , sensitively, as Ulrich Mack. For the last five decades the images and negatives were ignored in the archives, but now, Burkhard Arnold, owner of the internationally reputated in focus gallery in Cologne,worked with Ulrich Mack selecting photographs from this series for an exhibition – an equally important time piece in photography and media history.
The exhibition is complemented by a careful selection of photographs of two other series.
For one of Mack’s 1959 arising series “Ruhrgebiet” with its collieries and blast furnaces, its workers’ settlements, railroad tracks and loading ports – a defunct world of which only traces survived – and the other resulting from the 2001 series “Distance” with color pictures of great beauty (dye-transfer) about the vast salt marshes of Ipswich in the northeastern United States, in Massachusetts.
Ulrich Mack, born in 1934, was a photojournalist for Quick and Stern magazine before in 1975 he moved as a professor of visual communication at the FH Dortmund into teaching.
Mack has published several books (including a comparative study “Pellworm / Harkers Iceland”) and repeatedly received awards and honors for his life’s work.
Exhibition
Ulrich Mack – Reporter
From March 9th to May 8th, 2013
inFocus Galerie
Brüsseler Strasse 83
50672 Köln
Germany
Tel. + Fax.: 02211300341
up to March 28th 2013 – Tuesday to Saturday from 4.00 – 8.00 pm,
until May 8th only by appointment.
Book
Ulrich Mack: Kennedy in Germany
Photographs by Ulrich Mack
edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle
128 pages, 100 illustrations, 25.0 x 26.5 cm, hardcover
