Is photography art? For a long time the answer in Germany was “No” or at best “Maybe”. Until well into the 1970s the work of photographers was often tarnished by the stigma of producing for day-to-day consumption – for newspapers, for adverts or for the family album. Quite apart from the fact that everyone had a camera to play with now.
But more and more photographers aspired to work in an artistic context. Without waiting for commissions, they set out in search of their own themes and motifs. In West and East Berlin alike, exponents like Michael Schmidt, Dieter Appelt, Ulrich Wüst and Helga Paris redefined themselves. Their pictures were responses to their own artistic interests and ideas and nothing else – this was the birth of auteur photography. Documentation, a major task of photography, was infused by a subjective approach that revealed a personal view of the world and its realities.
