Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968–2013 - Berliner Festspiele

Content 

Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 – 2013 

16 November 2013 – 9 March 2014 

1. Press release 2 

2. Copyright list 5 

3. Biography Barbara Klemm 11 

4. Introduction 12 

5. Text from the exhibition catalogue 14 

"Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 – 2013" by Hans-Michael Koetzle 

6. Education programme (only in German) 25 

7. Factsheet 28 

8. Partners & Sponsors 30 

Attachments: 

Catalogue 

Exhibitions March to August 2014 

Information Wall AG 

Flyer, Poster 

Press kit: Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 - 2013 page 1

1. Press release 

Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 - 2013 

16 November 2013 to 9 March 2014 

Opening times: 

Wednesday to Monday 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., closed Tue 

Special opening times: open on every holiday, except 24 December and 31 December 

Organizer: 

Berliner Festspiele. 

Partner: 

Wall AG, BTM – Visit Berlin, Dussmann – Das KulturKaufhaus, The Mandala 

Media partners: 

FAZ 

Tagesspiegel, Zitty, Exberliner, Fotoforum, Cicero, Rolling Stone 

RBB inforadio 

Public Relations Office, Martin-Gropius-Bau: 

Katrin Mundorf, tel. +49 (0)30 25486-112, fax: +49 (0)30 25486-107 

E-mail: organisation@gropiusbau.de 

Probably no other German female photographer has followed the events of the past few 

decades as closely with her camera as Barbara Klemm. Her photographs show events of 

historic significance, encapsulating key images, turning points, and whole epochs. Now, 

specially for the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the famous photographer has put together a grand 

retrospective of her work spanning five decades and comprising some 300 exhibits covering 

the whole range of her oeuvre since 1968: political events, student unrest, citizens’ initiatives, 

scenes from divided and re-united Germany, everyday situations, and the realities of life from 

all corners of the earth, as well as sensitive portraits of artists, writers, musicians and visitors 

to the museum. 

A daughter of the painter Fritz Klemm, Barbara Klemm was born in Münster in 1939 and 

grew up in Karlsruhe, where she trained as a photographer. From 1959 to 2004 she worked 

for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ). In 1970 she became a staff photographer 

specializing in politics and the arts. Her first major political event was the negotiation of the 

treaties with the Eastern bloc between Brezhnev and Brandt. The photo with the unassuming 

caption “Leonid Brezhnev, Willy Brandt, Bonn, 1973” flashed round the world. Apparently 

unaware of being observed, Brezhnev and Brandt are seen engrossed in talks, surrounded 

by interpreters and advisers. The photographer’s camera is nowhere in evidence. Klemm has 

captured an intimate moment which more than any other symbolizes these treaties and the 


whole political trend of the 1970s. The picture is as remarkable for its immediacy and 

spontaneity as for its formal and balanced composition. 

Klemm has a unique ability to combine the frame and content of a picture with such formal 

criteria as structure, composition and perspective. Her works generally bear neutral captions 

giving the name, place and date of the event, thus indicating her view of herself as a 

detached and disinterested observer. 

From 1952 to 1999 there appeared the legendary rotogravure supplement of the FAZ, a 

magazine which came out every Saturday under the title “Bilder und Zeiten” (Pictures and 

Times), often with cover pictures by Barbara Klemm. The exhibition will feature about 70 of 

these supplements arranged by theme. They document a period of newspaper history. 

Yet Barbara Klemm is not just one of the most significant press photographers of post-war 

Germany, but also one of the few representatives of her trade who turned photojournalism 

into an art in its own right. Her consistently black-and-white pictures are not meant to be 

ephemeral. They are shot with a feeling for the essence of things that makes them icons of 

our recent past. Nor is she interested in sensation – her work is more imbued with respect 

and discretion, with empathy and an unerring feel for the most expressive moment. 

Barbara Klemm is curious, especially about people – whether in her press coverage, whose 

subjects we only do not recognize as portraits because we do not know the persons 

portrayed, or in the many portraits of artists to which she devoted herself in the 1980s. These 

are pictures made with detachment which at the same time allow the attitude, work and 

character of the artist to shimmer through. Barbara Klemm has photographed such renowned 

artists as Janis Joplin, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Neo Rauch, Gerhard Richter, Richard 

Serra, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Thomas Bernhard, Herta Müller and Joseph Beuys. 

She photographed Beuys in the Landesmuseum Darmstadt and in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in 

1982 while engaged in assembling his legendary work entitled “Hirschdenkmäler” (Stag 

Monuments) for the “Zeitgeist” exhibition. It is a moment of stillness and yet charged with 

energy that she has captured: the calm before the “lightning flash”. Recognizing such 

moments is the art of Barbara Klemm. 

Catalogue: 

Publisher: NIMBUS. Kunst und Bücher 

Museums edition: € 29 

Trade edition (German/English): € 48 

(ISBN 978-3-907142-93-6) 

Admission 

€ 9 / reduced rate € 6 

Admission free for those aged 16 or under 

Groups of 5 or more 

€ 6 per person / reduced rate: € 4 per person 

Combination tickets at favourable rates available at the cash desk 

Online tickets: www.gropiusbau.de 

Public guided tours 

Sundays at 3 p.m. (without advance booking) 

More at: www.gropiusbau.de 

Booked guided tours 

For groups: Guided tours in German (60 min.) € 60 plus € 6 admission per person 

For school and student groups (60 min.) € 45 plus € 4 admission per person 

For guided tours in other languages: € 10 extra 

Press kit: Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 – 2013 page 3

Parallel to the exhibition freely bookable and public workshops are held for school classes, 

children and young people aged 5 and over. 

Public Workshops for young people aged 5 and over and for families 

Friday 27.12., Sundays 29.12., 12.1., 19.1., 2.3.2014. The workshops begin at 1 p.m. and 

are free of charge. 

More information at: www.gropiusbau.de/schuelerprogramm 

Advice and booking for guided tours and workshops 

MuseumsInformation Berlin 

Tel. +49 (0)30 / 24749-888, fax +49 (0)30 / 24749-883 

museumsinformation@kulturprojekte-berlin.de 

www.museumsdienst-berlin.de 


2. Copyright list 



Bitte beachten Sie die Bildlegenden. Das Bildmaterial dient ausschließlich zur aktuellen 

redaktionellen Berichterstattung über die Ausstellung „Barbara Klemm. Fotografien 1968 - 

2013“ (16.11.2013 bis 09.03.2014) im Martin-Gropius-Bau. Die Berichterstattung von Text 

und Bild muss im Verhältnis 1:1 stehen, dann ist das Bildmaterial für 5 Bilder kostenfrei. Die 

Bilder dürfen nicht beschnitten, überdruckt oder manipuliert werden. Bitte vermerken Sie bei 

der Veröffentlichung die Angaben der Bildlegende. Die Rechte für Titelbildnutzungen und 

Bildstrecken sind bei dem jeweiligen Rechteinhaber direkt einzuholen und können 

kostenpflichtig sein. Wir bitten um Zusendung von 2 Belegexemplaren an die oben genannte 

Adresse. 

Please observe the copyright. All image material is to be used solely for editorial coverage of 

the current exhibition “Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 - 2013” (16.11.2013 – 09.03.2014) 

in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Please always mention the name of the artist, the work title and 

the copyright in the caption. The images must not be altered in any way, such as being 

cropped or printed over. The rights of use for title-page photos or photo spreads are to be 

obtained directly from the respective copyright holder. The ratio of text to image in the 

coverage should be 1:1, in which case there will be no charge for the use of 5 photos. Please 

send us 2 copies of your article to the address mentioned above. 

Martin-Gropius-Bau 

Pressearbeit / press office: 

Tel: +49 (0)30 / 25486-236 Fax: +49 (0)30 / 25486-235 | presse@gropiusbau.de 

Öffentlichkeitsarbeit / public relations: 

Tel : +49 (0)30 / 25486-123 | Fax: +49 (0)30 / 25486-107 | organisation@gropiusbau.de 

Download der Bilddateien unter / Download of the images at: www.gropiusbau.de 

01_Hitchcock 

Alfred Hitchcock, Frankfurt am Main, 1972 

© Barbara Klemm 


02_Brandt 

Leonid Breschnew, Willy Brandt, Bonn, 1973 


03_Gorbatschow 

Michail Sergejewitsch Gorbatschow, Berlin, 7.10.19 


04_Dutschke 

Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Offenbach, 

1975 


05_Startbahn 

Demonstration gegen die Startbahn-West, 

Frankfurt am Main, 1981 



06_Bohley_Gysi_Mueller 

Gregor Gysi, Bärbel Bohley, Ulrich Mühe, Heiner 

Müller, Demonstration Berlin-Ost, 4. November 

1989 


07_Wiedervereinigung 

Oskar Lafontaine, Willy Brandt, Hans-Dietrich 

Genscher, Hannelore und Helmut Kohl, Richard von 

Weizsäcker, Lothar de Maizière, Berlin, 

3. Oktober 1990 


08_Moskau 

Moskau, Russland, 1993 


09_Kalkutta 

Kalkutta, Indien, 1982 



10_Havanna 

Havanna, 1969 


11_NewYork 

New York, 2003 


12_Straßenszene 

Via Condotti, Rom, 1994 


13_Stuttgart 

Stuttgart, 1972 



14_Jagger 

Mick Jagger, Frankfurt am Main, 1970 


15_Warhol 

Andy Warhol, Frankfurt, 1981 


16_Beuys 

Joseph Beuys im Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 

1982 


17_Christo 

Verhüllter Reichstag, Christo, Berlin, 1995 



18_Biermann 

Wolf Biermann, Köln, 1976 


19_Herta_Mueller 

Herta Müller, Berlin, 2011 


20_Joplin 

Janis Joplin, Frankfurt am Main, 1969 


21_Klemm 

Portrait Barbara Klemm 

Foto: privat 


3. Biography 



Barbara Klemm was born in Münster, Westphalia, on 27 December 1939 and grew up in an 

artistic family in Karlsruhe. From 1955 to 1958 she trained as a photographer and began to 

work for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) in 1959. 

There followed her first publications in periodicals and magazines. From 1970 to 2004 she 

was a staff photographer at the FAZ for politics and arts coverage, doing many portraits of 

well-known personalities. She travelled widely, taking photographs in many countries on 

nearly all continents. 

Her work brought her many awards, including the “Dr. Erich Salomon Prize” of the German 

Photographic Society (1989), the “Maria Sibylla Merian Prize for Women Plastic Artists” in 

Hesse (1998), the “Hessian Culture Prize” (2000), the “Westphalian Art Prize” (2000), the 

“Max Beckmann Prize of the City of Frankfurt on Main” (2010) and the “Leica Hall of Fame 

Award” (2012). She lives in Frankfurt on Main. 

Her photographs are to be found in prestigious German and international collections, both 

public and private, such as the German Historical Museum, Berlin, the Folkwang Museum in 

Essen, the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt on Main, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 

the Gernsheim Collection of the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums, Mannheim, the Print Room 

(Kupferstichkabinett) of the Dresden State Art Collection, and the Gundlach Collection, 

Hamburg. 

In 1992 she became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin-Brandenburg, in 2000 she 

was made an Honorary Professor at Darmstadt Technical College in the Design Department 

of the Faculty of Photography, and in 2011 she was admitted to membership of the “Pour le 

mérite” order. 

Since the 1970s numerous collections of Barbara Klemm’s photographs have been 

published, most recently “Strassen Bilder” (Street Scenes), “Künstler” (Artists) and 

“Mauerfall” (Fall of the Wall) from Nimbus Verlag. 


4. Introduction 



“The public diary of the nation from the past forty years could be reconstructed from her 

archive, not as a monotonous string of major events, acts of state, or illustrations of social 

theses, but as a book of changes in politics, living environments and society. The magic 

formula for her work could go like this: she has shown us the private in the public and the 

public in the private. Only photography is in a position of such clarity and differentiation to get 

to the heart of civilization in a series of tableaux vivants.” (Durs Grünbein, from the speech 

on the occasion of the Max-Beckmann-Award for the photographer Barbara Klemm, 2010) 

For the very first time, a comprehensive retrospective will show Barbara Klemm’s globespanning 

photographic œuvre. 

She achieved fame with her iconic photographs taken in Germany and Europe. But a 

practically infinite number of trips also took her to China and Japan, Iran, India, North and 

South America, and Africa. This exhibition shows the global breadth of her work. Barbara 

Klemm was there when the student protests took place in Germany in the 1960s; she often 

stayed up until late at night waiting for the right moment to take her shot. She was there 

when Mario Soares freed his country from dictatorship; she was there when Willy Brandt 

negotiated with Brezhnev; she was there when Heinrich Böll protested in front of Mutlangen; 

she was there when Gorbachev made his famous short speech in East Berlin only weeks 

before the Wall fell; she was there when the Wall fell; she was there when Helmut Kohl made 

his speech in Dresden. 

She also became famous for her artists’ portraits: Andy Warhol and Richard Serra, Rainer 

Werner Fassbinder and Thomas Bernhard, Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, Heiner Müller 

and Herta Müller, Wolfgang Rihm and Simon Rattle. The photographs were never taken in a 

studio, as Barbara Klemm was concerned about catching the ambience. Accordingly, we 

also find cultural history in her pictures. 

If we look at this exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau through the eyes of our times, the 

ubiquitous in Barbara Klemm’s work becomes self-evident: long before the internet existed, 

hers were the pictures that significantly shaped our sense of the world. With 320 

photographs, this is a large exhibition but still only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of 

photographs that she has taken over time. 

The copper plate photogravure supplement from that era, “Bilder und Zeiten,” whose reports 

she illustrated with her black-and-white photos, remains unforgettable – some say the printed 

page is the original of Barbara Klemm’s photographs. Even today, when copper plate 

gravure is long since a thing of the past, she still works exclusively in black and white. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to photographs as “frozen time.” In this sense, Barbara 

Klemm’s pictures are examples of contemporary, social and world history. 


And the globetrotting photographer around the world still travels even these days to capture 

details of reality. 


5. Text from the exhibition catalogue 

“Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 – 2013” 



Black-and-White is Color Enough. On Barbara Klemm’s Photographic Œuvre 

By Hans-Michael Koetzle 

On the large, rich, and varied map of photography, Barbara Klemm is a continent in her own 

right. Her proud œuvre, reflecting more than four decades of recent every day and political 

history, might nonetheless be classified best within the broad field of photographic reportage 

if that term is applied to someone – equipped with a camera and film – who sets out to 

explore through images a world that is becoming increasingly more complex. 

Yet while the majority of reportage photographers have searched, and continue to search, for 

sensation, or at least for an event that is, if possible, spectacular or dramatic, or for a 

moment that breathes human suffering and distress, Barbara Klemm practices a type of 

suspense. Granted, she also reconstructs great moments with the camera, but she seems to 

have a different idea of historical moments than the relevant protagonists, those with power 

in politics, economy, and society. Klemm’s pictures, above all those from the political arena, 

are different. And that does not mean so much the tenacity with which she consistently 

focuses on classic, abstracting, black-and-white camera images in a colourful, shimmering 

media world. It means the way in which she sees the world, orders the chaos in the 

viewfinder, or, better still, waits until the chaos choreographs itself in a meaningful way 

before the lens. What Barbara Klemm seeks, what her curiosity, her alert eye, looks for, are 

the rather quiet and unpretentious gestures in which the state of a time, a culture, or a 

society are revealed. Although Klemm’s pictures are clearly structured, they are complex and 

easy to read at the same time; those who would like to understand them have to look quite 

closely in order to decode the punctum invoked by Roland Barthes. Every picture is a saga in 

itself, a grand narrative in which the political can be just as elevated as the private, the 

common just as the special, the bizarre just as the every day. As a whole, her œuvre forms 

an endless history of our time. 

From 1970 to 2004, Barbara Klemm was a photographer with fixed employment at the 

opinion-forming, conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). At its behest, she 

travelled to Offenbach or Leningrad, to the visit of the Pope in Bottrop or to Berlin, to the 

German-Polish border or to Peter Handke in Paris. Barbara Klemm’s photography over three 

and a half decades was contract photography, journalistic photography, documentary 

photography – not art. When one considers Barbara Klemm, what is surprising and special is 

the fact that early on, actually from the very start, she understood how to make an 

assignment into a personal project for herself, turning homework into a personal concern. 

Barbara Klemm practiced – actually a contradiction – author photography on commission. In 

other words, the pictures that she took were first and foremost her pictures, guided by a 

sensitive, sympathetic gaze, something that should not be confused with partiality. 


Barbara Klemm’s camera art mediates between closeness and distance, maintains presence 

and distance in a subtle way. And now that the word has been used, yes: Barbara Klemm’s 

pictorial creations are to a great extent aesthetic creations; not snapshots, not strokes of luck 

owing to coincidence, but rather meticulously developed solutions with a formal rigor and 

without an expiration date. Although Klemm’s forum is the daily newspaper, yet the half-life 

period of her images goes beyond sales at newsstands. What she seeks and finds are 

formulas that apply to the state of our world at a particular moment in time. This gives her 

pictures topicality and at the same time makes them true beyond the particular day. Klemm’s 

pictorial world reflects a signature as well as an attitude that one might easily call moral. 

Although many of her pictures are highly political, they are always personal. One might call 

this art or not, what is important is the formal aesthetic quality paired with an intent that is 

documentary and/or enlightening. She herself, Klemm says, never approached her work as if 

she were making art. “However, when someone succeeds in achieving an image 

composition, when the picture is condensed into a statement, I would perhaps then speak of 

art.” 1 

Since many years Barbara Klemm has found entry into the museum world with her images. 

The American Trade Center in Frankfurt am Main honoured Barbara Klemm with a first show 

in 1969, therefore, prior to her being hired full-time as a photographer by the FAZ. Exhibitions 

in large, important, internationally renowned institutions followed, including the Museum für 

Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (Museum of Arts and Crafts, 1976), the Frankfurter 

Kunstverein (Frankfurt Art Association, 1978), the Museum Folkwang in Essen (1982), the 

Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (1990/91), and the Deutsches Historisches Museum 

in Berlin (German Historical Museum, 1999), to name only the most important ones. 

Exhibitions like these have ennobled the work of Barbara Klemm, have again and again 

underscored her standing – above all the validity of the pictorial compositions created at an 

intersection between historical-political document and aesthetic construction. In addition, 

there are her books, a first one with the simple title Bilder (Pictures) published by S. Fischer 

Verlag in 1986. There are also a round dozen of exhibition catalogues. Not to forget her 

participation in anthologies and group exhibitions, including one curated by F. C. Gundlach 

for the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in 1996, Das deutsche Auge (The German Eye), which 

presented Barbara Klemm alongside names such as Martin Munkacsi, Stefan Moses, Robert 

Lebeck, and Thomas Höpker. Klemm’s pictures, in other words, stand the test of time both 

on museum walls as well as on art paper. Nevertheless, their true place was the newspaper 

page, the politics section of the FAZ, the features pages or the legendary, gravure print 

supplement that was dropped at the end of 2001, the so-called “Glanzbeilage” (glossy paper 

supplement) with the wonderfully title Bilder und Zeiten (Pictures and Times). Barbara 

Klemm’s photographs achieved “their greatest intensity” not as handmade prints, as writer 

Martin Mosebach once emphasized, but rather when printed in the supplement. 2 Or to quote 

Matthias Flügge: her “original was, ultimately, the printed page.” 3 

Barbara Klemm’s work for the FAZ was a symbiosis of a special kind. The newspaper offered 

her a brilliant daily forum with a community that went literally into the millions. It offered her 

an environment that was per haps conservative, but intellectually always sophisticated with 

reports, opinions, and essays often by renowned writers. And not least, it offered her the 

opportunity to travel and to make discoveries. It offered security, reliability, opened doors, 

provided access, a ticket, the necessary accreditation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine helped 

Barbara Klemm achieve the status of a serious journalist – even when she, astute as she 

was, did not always want to be taken seriously. Conversely, Barbara Klemm shaped the face 

of a newspaper that has to be counted among the important journalistic achievements of the 

German federal democracy. Klemm became an “institution,” as was once formulated by Durs 

Grünbein. 4 Multiple generations of FAZ readers enjoyed a daily ritual, namely identifying the 

pictures in the paper by Barbara Klemm; the majority would certainly have identified her 

black-and-white contributions reliably even without the (somewhat smaller typeset) credit – 

“Foto Barbara Klemm.” 


Even if the title page, which was deliberately kept imageless for decades – the dogma was 

only abandoned in 2007 5 – suggests differently: the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was not 

a newspaper that was hostile to images. In its first years, prominent names such as Liselotte 

Strelow, Otto Steinert, Fritz Eschen, Walde Huth, Chargesheimer, Stefan Moses, Robert 

Häusser, or F. C. Gundlach can be found – alongside in-house photographers such as Fritz 

Fenzl, Lutz Kleinhans, or Wolfgang Haut. 

Photography for a newspaper of course meant something different than photography for a 

periodical or an illustrated magazine. No reportages with a lead, a core, and a conclusion 

were requested, as the legendary magazine Life – probably the most well-known – 

demanded from its photographers. What were sought were coherent, preferably landscape 

format, possibly multiple-column individual pictures that were meant to communicate a topic, 

an event, a message, or a story plausibly. Thus Barbara Klemm became a master of these 

one-image-stories. Although more recent book titles – for instance Blick nach Osten (Look to 

the East), Mein Brandenburg (My Brandenburg), or Straßen Bilder (Street Pictures) – might 

suggest otherwise, Barbara Klemm never worked on cycles, never sought out series, or 

structured sequences, though parts of her œuvre can be organized retrospectively according 

to themes. Nevertheless, it is always single pictures, visual solitaires, with which Barbara 

Klemm wins people over, and which made her famous, securing her a place in the more 

recent history of photography. For her, it was never sufficient to simply reproduce a situation 

coherently, to document a phenomenon, or to describe an event. In Klemm’s work, there is 

always an added value, a type of additional benefit, which frequently requires a high degree 

of cultural or political knowledge to be decoded. Seen in this way, Klemm brings together 

multiple images, multiple levels of meaning in one single motif. Freddy Langer speaks of 

“Ein-Bild-Reportagen” (one-image-reportage), an art that Barbara Klemm early on made her 

own. “I truly think in individual images,” she once admitted. “I search for a picture that makes 

the reader curious, that tells a story, even when it does not necessarily correspond with the 

one described in the article below it. In the exhibitions and books, perhaps four or five 

pictures from one trip stand next to one another. But for me series have never been 

interesting. Placing multiple pictures after one another to reproduce a dialogue as in film, so 

to speak, is something that I have never particularly liked.” 7 

Those who chose photography as a profession in the fifties, a discipline, mind you, with little 

prestige at that time, were generally inspired by the Family of Man exhibition that started with 

aplomb in New York in 1955 and then travelled around the world in multiple editions; by 

Henri Cartier-Bresson and his book Images à la sauvette (The Decisive Moment) published 

in 1952; by William Klein’s New York of 1956, or by Robert Frank’s photo book The 

Americans, which was first published in 1958. There is hardly any renowned photographer of 

the sixties and seventies who was not impressed or inspired in his decision to choose 

photography by one or the other event. Barbara Klemm apparently made do without any 

great role models, thus she also escaped the danger of epigonism and found her way to her 

own unmistakable signature seemingly all by herself. If one asks Klemm about formative 

impressions from the time of her artistic initiation, then what comes up at best is a reference 

to a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition seen in Mannheim “at the end of the sixties, beginning 

of the seventies” 8 that enthralled her. But at that point, Klemm was already a “finished” 

photographer, or in any case one who could rely on her own eye, her own flair. She 

incidentally also took notice early on of the work of her later colleague Wolfgang Haut in the 

Frankfurter Allgemeine. “I had already seen pictures by Haut in Karlsruhe,” Klemm recalls. 

“My parents subscribed to the newspaper. I was only interested in the supplement on 

Saturday, in order to see what Haut had done.” 9 What remains as formative are her domestic 

surroundings, the artistic work of her father, the painter Fritz Klemm, whose panel painting 

with its rigor of form translated the environment into a distinct imagery and tended toward 

monochromy. It is “from him,” Jean-Christophe Ammann asserts, “she may have inherited 

her ‘painterly’ or ‘artistic’ eye, the eye that has the ability to perceive space or to immediately 

recognize things in their relationship in space.” 10 


Barbara Klemm, who was born in Münster in 1939 and grew up in Karlsruhe in Baden, early 

on experienced what art can mean. Namely, a mission in life, a spiritual challenge, a 

broadening of perception, of the gaze, but also economic bottlenecks, everything other than 

abundance in everyday life. The Klemms had six children. Barbara was the fourth. She did 

not do well at school, would have been held back, and was taken out of school at the age of 

fourteen and placed at her mother’s side at home. The child was supposed to take her time 

to explore her talents, to get to know her abilities – that was the idea. And, as related to 

photography: it had a fixed place in the family, at least as a medium for private memories. 

Her father, as Barbara Klemm reports, purchased a Contax the year of her birth, took family 

photos with it, and even enlarged them himself. 11 On her part, Klemm was allowed to take a 

photo course at the Volksbildungsheim (adult education center) and was given a box camera 

to take pictures. Photography – situated somewhere between handicraft and art, alchemy 

and livelihood – thus actually became a career option. In 1955, Barbara Klemm began a 

classical photography apprenticeship as a photographer in the studio of Jule Bauer in 

Karlsruhe. Her father had established the contact. “Passport photos, portraits, a bit of 

architecture,” 12 as Klemm recalls, were central to the day-to-day business, which meant 

studio work, routine, anything but artistic self-realization. Nevertheless, Klemm learned what 

she fundamentally still draws on today: working with light. Working in the darkroom, weighing 

the developer, retouching negatives, dodging prints, in short: solid handicraft. Barbara 

Klemm still continues to enlarge her barite prints herself. In her œuvre, pictures for the 

newspaper – mostly in the format 30 x 40 cm – also have a museum quality. For her, 

Barbara Klemm never gets tired of pointing out, “this process of developing and enlarging” is 

“how I am able to adjust the tonal values, the second step to a good picture.” 13 Moreover, 

one can “enhance the newspaper prints that are not very good with excellent 

enlargements.” 14 In 1958, Barbara Klemm completed her apprenticeship with a final 

examination, afterward taking a little-loved position in a half-tone photo engraving institution 

in order, as she herself admits, to “always have Saturdays off,” 15 and in 1959 finally came to 

the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which was not actually looking for a photographer. 

Barbara Klemm was hired as a half-tone photo engraver and spent the following ten years 

printing black-and-white photos. 

“One might puzzle over why a true talent such as Barbara Klemm prescribed herself an 

incubation period of some ten years for her art,” Christoph Stölzl once argued. Possibly, 

according to the founding director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, it was in 

those years that she developed specifically those qualities “that ultimately led to the ‘period 

of apprenticeship’ and assisting Wolfgang Haut, and without which her unmistakable style 

would not have been able to emerge.” 16 Klemm, this much is sure, was close to the revered 

Wolfgang Haut, had direct access to his pictures, experienced up-close what picture editors 

refer to as editing, refined her darkroom practice, and moreover may have anticipated that 

she herself would one day be out and about as a photographer for the FAZ. Barbara Klemm 

has a quiet demeanour, appears modest, and the affectations of stars are alien to her. But 

those close to her know she is tough, tough in striving for the best picture, and, presumably, 

also resolute with respect to her own career. What do ten years matter when one ultimately 

ends up working, or more precisely, is allowed to take photographs for one of the best 

newspapers in the world? In 1970, the “incubation period,” according to Christoph Stölzl, 

came to an end and Klemm received a contract as a staff photographer with a focus on 

features and politics. She had already begun to take photographs and to work actively as a 

photojournalist. In 1965, she took a portrait of Paul Sethe, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s 

founding editor. Sethe died in 1967, and Klemm’s picture was published in the weekly news 

paper Die Zeit – indeed her very first publication. Pictures in Spiegel, in Stern, and in Christ 

und Welt followed. In high demand at the time were pictures from the milieu of the student 

movement, which was particularly active in Frankfurt. “I took part in the events of the 

students along with my husband, who was studying medicine at that time, and sometimes I 

stayed until the end,” Barbara Klemm remembers. “The highpoints of these meetings mostly 

came late at night when the staff photographers – who were under constant deadline 

pressure – had already left. So I got pictures they couldn’t get.” 17 


This anecdote from the early years is illuminating with respect to Barbara Klemm’s working 

method and also indicative of her approach in the case of later assignments. She likes to 

arrive before the others, sounds out the terrain, examines standpoints, and explores 

possibilities. Or she remains when the others have already left because they think that they 

have their picture. What cannot be seen in Klemm’s photos is the journalistic competition (an 

exception is “CDU-Veranstaltung, Erfurt, 1991,” p. 55, where she deliberately shifts her 

gaze). Klemm is not alone, at any rate not in the case of major political events; she competes 

with dozens, if not hundreds of photographing colleagues often enough and nevertheless 

achieves results that one might think were served to her on a silver platter. Klemm climbs 

onto ladders, onto walls, scales barriers or the welcome roof of a VW bus that is standing 

around – as in the case of the protest against the new “Startbahn West” (p. 38) runway in 

Frankfurt – in order to capture a historical moment in all of its dynamics in a meaningful 

manner. She photographed Willy Brandt, Walter Momper, and Dietrich Stobbe on the 

morning of November 10, 1989 from the top of the Berlin Wall (p. 129). Actually, says 

Klemm, she would “much rather have had the Wall in the background.” But in the crush a 

change of location couldn’t be managed, and so one learns to make a virtue of necessity. 

“And one also has to get lucky,” Barbara Klemm knows. “The fact that there was back light 

and that the gathering of the masses took place like a maelstrom could not have been 

determined in advance. A wonderful order of the people then arose, one that no director 

could have invented.” 18 

One does not manage to get onto walls, over fences, onto car roofs with large amounts of 

equipment, or only with difficulty. Barbara Klemm has always kept her equipment limited and 

easy to manage. First, in order to stay mobile. Second, so that she did not stick out as a 

professional. Klemm loves understatement, loves to be underestimated. That was “always a 

great help” to her. 19 Especially in the East – we are speaking of the time before the fall of the 

Wall –, that “worked wonderfully,” she “was never revealed as a professional photographer. I 

roamed around, had only one camera in my hand and a white bag; I never had a real photo 

bag. People didn’t perceive me as a professional photographer, and that made my work 

easier.” 20 

Two cameras and lenses with various fixed focal lengths – small-format cameras, it goes 

without saying, often one (Canon) single lens reflex and one (Leica) rangefinder camera – 

are enough for Klemm. Additional lenses, films, and accessories are located in the bag 

mentioned; occasionally also a monopod for longer focal lengths. Flash is taboo. Barbara 

Klemm deliberately uses available light, which sometimes also might include the lighting of 

competitor television teams as in the case of “Helmut Kohl in Dresden, Dezember 19, 1989” 

(p. 130), a landscape format motif whose pictorial composition, whose drama along with a 

spectral chiaroscuro calls to mind Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus – and 

stands its ground as a photograph. Flash distracts; flash alters a situation. Correspondingly, 

“available light” is part of the documentary self-conception of Barbara Klemm as well as part 

of her aesthetic credo, which aims at pictures that are as authentic as they are unusual. 

“Available light” can mean all sorts of things: the diffuse light of an overcast sky, hard rays of 

light owing to the summer sun – as in the case of her vertically structured photo of the 

Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate – or back light in combination with a cool, 

perhaps morning mist as in the look toward the Siegessäule on the “Tag der deutschen 

Vereinigung, Berlin, 3. Oktober 1990” (p. 135). 

And there is still something else that is part of the standards (as one would perhaps like to 

say) in Barbara Klemm’s professional vita: chutzpah, a particular subversion – which one 

would not expect from the always friendly, amiable, not to say soignée photographer. Before 

1990, no one explored the world behind the Iron Curtain, the GDR, Poland, Rumania, the 

Czech Republic, the former Soviet Union, as intensively, as thoroughly as Barbara Klemm – 

and at the same time accepted working conditions that were anything but ideal. “The majority 

of people in the West indeed had no idea how those in the East lived,” says Barbara Klemm, 

who used every occasion – the Leipzig Trade Fair, the Ostseewoche (Baltic Sea Week), the 


Arbeiterfestspiele (Workers’ Festival) – to get hold of accreditation. “We often, as in Poland, 

had to take minders who worked as interpreters with us everywhere, and they sometimes 

held their hand in front of the lens and said: ‘No, not that.’ I often tried to escape them and 

went out early in the morning and was back again by breakfast. That is how I took, for 

example, the photo in Liegnitz in which three generations are sitting together on an old 

horse-drawn wagon. I would not have been able to photograph that if someone had been 

standing next to me.” 21 Again and again, this much is clear, she is at locations where she 

does not belong, or in any case is not expected. Tricks and inspirations, Klemm thinks, are 

simply part of it, things that “one learns with time. In the case of political occasions, I always 

thought, if they throw me out, then so be it.” 22 Klemm is under pressure to succeed. But that 

is also part of her profession, one has to come home with usable results. You can’t print 

apologies, they say in the business. In 1970, Barbara Klemm was in Warsaw to accompany 

the negotiations of treaties with the Warsaw Bloc states. “What was difficult for me,” reported 

Klemm, “was the fact that our Foreign Minister Walter Scheel was mostly not there for the 

negotiations. I had to bring home something political and therefore wanted to have the 

German and Polish Foreign Ministers together in one picture. The press spokesman told me 

that there would only be one dinner together, and no press would be admitted. But I could 

position myself in front of the hotel. Naturally, I thought that it wouldn’t work out, particularly 

since I didn’t have a flash and also didn’t want to use one. It was November, and it was wet. 

So I put on a skirt, had my bag and all my equipment along, and walked straight through the 

hotel lobby, which was full of security people. I had my nose lifted right up – and then I saw a 

door in which men in suits, including Walter Scheel, were standing. I headed toward them. 

And when Scheel saw me, he asked: ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I want to take 

photographs.’ He said: ‘Well, stick around then.’” 23 

Barbara Klemm has accompanied chancellors, observed election campaigns, reported on 

party conventions. She has been the chronicler of German politics since the late sixties. 

When we remember Joschka Fischer in sneakers, Heinrich Böll in Mutlangen at a peaceful 

protest against medium range missiles (p. 46), or the just toppled Social Democratic Party 

chairman Rudolf Scharping in pictures, then they are probably photos by Barbara Klemm that 

appear in our mind. 

At the same time, it would be amiss to reduce Barbara Klemm to the political (in the narrower 

sense). She is also, and not least, a master in capturing the incidental. She discovers the 

profoundly human in everyday life again and again. Over supposedly banal moments, she 

writes a great history of the life and customs of our time that is in no way limited to German 

conditions. Let’s take the picture “Frankfurt 1971.” (p. 15) A “Trinkhalle,” as the phenomenon 

of the street kiosk is commonly called in Frankfurt. People, men to be precise, are standing 

around drinking beer. Nothing definitive, or nothing of consequence, is taking place apart 

from the fact that all of them are dressed similarly and two are watching a young boy. But 

isn’t waiting, isn’t doing nothing, standing around, also part of the arsenal of daily life? 

Barbara Klemm’s reportage photography proves itself in the “seemingly matter-of course, the 

undramatic, in the lack of sensation. They are calm, tranquil pictures of people walking, 

sitting, waiting,” as Barbara Catoir once put it very beautifully. 24 Or, to quote Ingo Schulze: “In 

the work of Barbara Klemm, who trusts that the observer will read the pictures, the 

unspectacular behaves inversely proportionate to expressiveness and complexity up to the 

visionary.” 25 

Apart from the portraits, focusing quite consciously on individuals from art, culture, and 

politics, Klemm developed from the very start a particular preference for the interaction of 

people. Christoph Stölzl noted this early on. “No one,” he wrote, “has addressed themselves 

to groups in recent years as consistently as she has. No one has recognized so well that the 

more recent social history of the Federal Republic is decisively no longer defined by the 

individual but instead by the power of groupings and associations.” 26 But it is not only the top 

politicians, the police, the regular drinking mates who inspire the interest of the photographer. 

It is often enough contemporaries who do not necessarily have anything to do 


with one another, who have been brought together by coincidence, and who now form a 

small society, often a bit lost in a mouse-gray wallpapered world. In Barbara Klemm’s visual 

repertoire, there is always a place for the theater of the absurd. 

The international author-photographers of the nineteen eighties and nineties in particular – 

under the influence of Robert Frank, William Klein, or Sergio Larrain – revolutionized the 

photographic gaze. Blur, severely truncated figures, the “shot from the hip” have played as 

much of a role as slanting horizons or harsh light-dark contrasts. In contrast to this, Barbara 

Klemm’s photos are carefully structured. Her creative will is decisive but in no way radical. 

There is no blurring or obliterations, no figures protruding into the picture from the left or the 

right, no more or less coincidental breaches of the rules. Klemm’s pictures are “unusually 

precisely composed,” Jean-Christophe Ammann noted. 27 This makes her distinctive and 

unmistakable. Klemm adheres to a clear grammar, not slavishly, but nonetheless 

consistently to such an extent that one is able to speak of a style. She values the imagedefining 

horizontal, likes to create her pictures with axial symmetry, loves the orthogonal 

perspective. One often enough looks at Klemm’s pictures as if at a theater stage, the curtain 

lifted, with the photographer assigning the viewer a comfortable seat approximately in the 

center of the stalls. “Klemm developed her style,” Barbara Catoir confirms, “on the one hand 

with her preferred frontal view, as a result of which she is able to contain the individuals in a 

stage-like architectonic framing, on the other by means of coincidental or controlled 

encounters of motifs from the fore- and background.” 28 Actually not all, but remarkably many 

of Klemm’s pictures are created in an exceptionally two-dimensional manner. And when 

individuals do appear, then it is often in an ordered formation that frequently facilitates 

wonderful comparisons. One might think of the group portrait on the day of German 

unification with Oskar Lafontaine, Willy Brandt, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut and 

Hannelore Kohl, Richard von Weizsäcker and Lothar de Maizière: positively an atlas of 

temperaments and emotions (p. 134). 

Barbara Klemm’s cosmos is decidedly black-and-white. This has to do with her affinity to 

classic photography. Black-and-white, she once said, is color enough. 29 On the other hand, 

this is due to the needs of her newspaper, which did not print virtually any color in the 

editorial section prior to 2007. The situation changed a bit when the Frankfurter Allgemeine 

Zeitung launched its weekly magazine in 1980. 30 None other than Willy Fleckhaus, formerly 

the art director of the magazine twen, was chosen to design the supplement enclosed on 

Fridays. Wolfgang Haut and Barbara Klemm were supposed to take photographs for the 

magazine and were named in the colophon in the early issues. However, it quite soon 

became clear that they had truly different opinions regarding the visual language, the 

aesthetic, and in particular the task of journalistic photography. Even today, Klemm 

remembers the conflicts with Fleckhaus, who treated her like a student. One was constantly 

being “briefed.” “We have to photograph essays,” Fleckhaus said again and again, 

something that frequently meant staging and thus conflicted with the journalistic position 

represented by Barbara Klemm. She distinctly remembers a photo appointment with Botho 

Strauss. “Perhaps we can do a profile and stretch it over two pages,” Fleckhaus proposed. 

“With that, it was clear that the head would be truncated,” according to Klemm, who 

proposed first meeting the author. “He actually did have very thick glasses, which meant that 

a profile didn’t even come into question.” She generally had big problems with Fleckhaus’s 

way of cropping pictures. “We were extras for his design.” 31 

Willy Fleckhaus, who died unexpectedly in 1983, was a master of the art of increasing the 

impact of mediocre pictures through cropping. He favoured positioning good pictures over 

the gutter, presented them running off the edge, or combined lead stories with so-called 

“Würzbeigaben” (spicy additions). Barbara Klemm did not have to fear the like at the FAZ, at 

most she occasionally had to fight there for her pictorial creations. But her pictures were 

never cropped or changed. Also no disruptive fold, instead there was text which surrounded 

the photographs like a gray passé-partout – motifs that did not always have to correspond in 

terms of content with the respective article. When she began working for the newspaper, 


there was still the opportunity to bring in “free pictures,” photos that stand for themselves and 

only wanted to be read as pictures. During this time, Barbara Klemm may have become 

accustomed to looking everywhere and all the time, to discovering, to collecting pictures for 

possible future purposes. Her motifs, in the best sense, are found, not invented or staged. 

Although it might be asked how it is possible for particular situations to form in such a 

compelling manner. In 1985 in China, Klemm captured – once again with a stringently 

orthogonal gaze, thus while avoiding spatial depth – a group of female and male construction 

workers, whose interaction brings about a wonderfully light, almost exhilarated choreography 

(p. 228). Or “Ukraine, UdSSR, 1978”: a group of women harvesters in the open country. 

They have probably paused to take a break. But the way in which they present or have put 

down their tools, as if in accordance with an invisible geometrician, is astounding, and also 

astoundingly quickly and well observed: everyday culture as a diorama (p. 100). Pictures by 

Barbara Klemm are “immediately recognizable,” reckons Andreas Platthaus, “because there 

is no one who has her instinct for constellations – of people inter acting, but also of 

individuals and spaces…” 32 “How did you do that, Frau Klemm?” Verena Lueken once 

asked, 33 paraphrasing the German title of a classic book by François Truffaut. 34 “I’m happy to 

play the director,” says Klemm, “and simply wait until everything sorts itself out.” 35 

It has been said of Barbara Klemm’s pictures that they possess “a natural nobility,” 36 

something that especially applies to her glimpses into the everyday life of simple, stranded, 

or older people. Barbara Klemm shows them in their struggle, their hardship, their loneliness, 

without caricaturing them. Even a dead person (“Mord, Frankfurt 1974”), exposed 

defenseless to the gazes of the boulevard, is given her respect when Klemm, from a fitting 

distance, integrates the corpse sprawled out in the foliage into the investigation taking place, 

with a quiet professionalism that even the most faithful viewer of “Tatort” (Crime Scene, a 

long-running television show) has never seen. “She observes people, but she does not 

betray them,” says Wilfried Wiegand, 37 while Christoph Stölzl emphasizes her “fairness with 

respect to all of the people present.” 38 The latter should perhaps be qualified. Barbara 

Klemm, despite all the humanism, as Ursula Zeller has pointed out, of a “positive prevailing 

mood”, 39 also has a thoroughly critical, dissecting, if not wicked eye, which she activates in 

particular when she enters the political arena. Klemm knows the business of politics, knows 

the protagonists and their networks. Each day that she works, and that means actually every 

day, begins with the attentive study of multiple daily newspapers. The readings do not only 

mobilize ideas, make her attentive to subjects, they also assist her in seeing through the 

political circus. What clever commentaries attempt to present in multiple columns, such as 

the tense relationship between two natures as different as those of Willy Brandt and Helmut 

Schmidt – one might speak of a cultivated aversion on a high level – Barbara Klemm gets to 

its heart with one single photo (p. 69). Or her portrait of a smirking Hans Filbinger (p. 65), 

who – notwithstanding his dark brown past during the National Socialist era – seems to be 

gloating because he is playing along, is allowed to play a role in the political ring in the young 

Federal Republic. Images like these – above all Barbara Klemm’s political group portraits – 

are naturally a feast for the eyes of analysts. Again and again Klemm succeeds, in a fraction 

of a second, in filtering out characters from the course of time: Mitterrand as a bon vivant, 

Honecker as an honest man, Schröder as a winner (p. 156), Scharping as a loser, Kohl as a 

power seeker, Joschka Fischer as a shrewd chap – an encyclopaedia of possible roles and 

sensitivities. 

Barbara Klemm’s œuvre, Wilfried Wiegand has underscored, is “so multifaceted and so 

extensive that it is difficult to find a formula for it.” 40 Naturally, the individual is always central, 

the political as well as the private, the colorless as well as the charismatic, the active one as 

well as the one who only sits there, waits, looks, and thus on his part illustrates an aggregate 

state of human being. There are, however, also landscapes in Klemm’s work, urban 

landscapes, interiors. Works of art, sculptures, installations are able to animate her just as 

well to create images as the material from which strictly speaking all photos are made: light. 

Yet nonetheless, there is one genre to which Klemm feels herself indebted in a special way: 

the portrait, especially the artist’s portrait – not in the sense of a (preferably 


prominent) face captured while passing by, but rather as a harvesting of a very deliberate 

encounter. One might trace this pronounced interest in the portrait for the time being to 

Klemm’s training in a portrait studio, even when there are significant differences. What 

Klemm cultivates today is the “environmental portrait” – the term was once coined in 

connection with Arnold Newman. There fore, no neutral background, no positioned lighting, 

no sought-out poses, instead the person, the artist, the creative individual in his or her 

natural surroundings, tidied up (Golo Mann), exuberant (Friederike Mayröcker), ascetic 

(Botho Strauss), inexpressive (Peter Handke), bourgeois (Ernst Jünger), or practical (Hans 

Magnus Enzensberger) – whatever the case might be. What connects both disciplines – the 

studio portrait and the one on site – is the being together, the interaction. Seen in this way, 

the portrait is always reflecting the person taking the photo, with his or her greater or lesser 

talent of getting the other to open up, of alluring, of winning over. “Every successful portrait is 

the document of a successful encounter,” Wilfried Wiegand once stated. 41 And Andrzej 

Szczypiorski summarizes: “A photograph not only narrates what it records, it also says 

something about the person who took it.” 42 

In the case of Barbara Klemm, this applies in particular to her portraits, which form a nearly 

unbelievable ABC of prominent painters, poets, and scholars. Klemm sees them not as 

expressive physiognomies but almost always as whole individuals: these then include 

William Gaddis’s vain slippers as well as Patricia Highsmith’s color-coordinated sneakers, 

the gray socks of a Peter Handke, or the white ones of a Jürgen Habermas (p. 334). And 

when it occasionally comes down to a three-quarter or half-length portrait, then the hands are 

allowed to tell something about the individual: smoker’s hands, sober hands, clasped hands, 

welcoming hands, the hands of someone who is deeply insecure as in the case of “Andy 

Warhol, Frankfurt am Main 1981” (p. 320) – “No favorite of the gods. A disillusioned artist 

who has finished with the world.” 43 With her pictures, Klemm makes the profoundly private 

public. With her, we look into the laboratories of art, which reflect character on their part. 

Barbara Klemm does not have a sophisticated theory of the portrait. In any case, not one that 

one could look up. But she does have precise ideas of what a good journalistic portrait is 

supposed to achieve. Ideas that she probably has discussed again and again with her 

husband, the psychoanalyst Leo Hilbert. Incidentally, Barbara Klemm prepares herself 

intensively for her portrait appointments, reads up on the person, consults the archive of the 

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For her, this is part of the handcraft just as much as the time 

that she takes or the friendliness with which she behaves. A politeness that has become 

rare, but behind which, however, is concealed an uncompromising searching and striving for 

a picture that is valid. 

Taking photographs means not least assuming a standpoint – in the literal as well as the 

figurative sense. In her portrait work, Barbara Klemm knows exactly what she wants, without 

however slavishly adhering to one concept, whatever it might be. Therefore, no cloths 

brought along to conceal the surroundings, no additional lighting. Klemm allows her 

protagonists to stage themselves, while she is flexible, tremendously present, intellectually 

as well as physically highly mobile. Photography is also a sport, is qui vive. She likes to 

quote Henri Cartier-Bresson, who wrote, “as a photographer, one always has to keep 

moving.” 44 She gives herself over to a space, an environment, a specific atmosphere, allows 

herself to be surprised, and understands how to form a valid portrait even when what is 

offered is minimal. “When she came to Dürrenmatt, he suddenly ranted about what she 

wanted; the other day he was so friendly that nothing but bland pictures were created – 

compared with the day before. Although they had an appointment, Peter Handke asked, 

‘What do you actually want to do?’ She responded, ‘I’ll simply watch what you’re doing right 

now.’ He responded to this by saying: ‘I’m sitting here, I’m not doing anything.’ To which she 

replied: ‘Good, then just sit there and don’t do anything.’ She says: ‘And that was the 

picture.’” 45 

Barbara Klemm’s approach also becomes clear in comparison with those portraits that were 

taken by photographers such as Serge Cohen or Abe Frajndlich for the magazine of the FAZ 


in the nineteen eighties or nineties, for which Annie Leibovitz served as inspiration. And in 

this way, the supposed greats appeared in the pictures with lots of fantasy, circus-like skill, 

tremendous effort, and a strategy schooled by photo design. Klemm, in contrast, arrives 

alone, with her simple bag and the two cameras, searches for rather intimate moments, of 

which then not every one has to reach a public attuned to insights into the private. In the 

case of Thomas Bernhard, she says, the painted portrait of a young man caught her eye. “I 

asked if he was a relative of his. He replied no and only said: ‘He looks at me so serenely.’ I 

then said: ‘I’d like you to look into the camera like that for me.’ He smiled and looked into the 

camera for me. This picture had an almost private quality. I only gave it to the newspaper 

when he died. There was such a smile in his eyes that I thought it was actually meant for 

me.” 46 

With her age-related retirement from the editorial staff of the FAZ, Barbara Klemm has not 

given up photography. She remains curious, a tireless witness, even though work on her 

archive, preparing for books and exhibitions has now come to occupy the majority of her time 

and energy. Barbara Klemm still keeps her archive at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 

which continues to have access to her visual world and regularly publishes her pictures. As 

far as the digital world is concerned: “It doesn’t appeal to me at all,” admits Barbara Klemm. 

“First, professional digital cameras are enormously heavy, and the work would not become 

easier since I would have to carry around even more. Second, I like going into the darkroom.” 

And third, she says, the mystery gets lost: “I believe that it can lead to a lack of concentration 

and that one might perhaps miss the important moment.” 47 

Barbara Klemm’s photography is “a quiet art,” Wilfried Wiegand once emphasized, “an art of 

nuances.” 48 The great Ellen Auerbach in a very personal text attested to the fact that her 

younger friend and colleague had a magical “third eye”: “This eye sees what is invisible, what 

is essential, sees what underlies appearances. The tree-ish in a tree, the divine in a louseridden 

child.” 49 This is beautifully said, and with a predicate to boot that does not actually 

exist: the “tree-ish” quality extends through Barbara Klemm’s work like a basso continuo. Her 

quest aims at the essence. Her goal is to filter out what is essential. Her tool of the trade – a 

camera, naturally. In addition, a great humanism, curiosity, an alert eye, energy, the implicit 

will to illuminate, to inform, to narrate; but also an incredible talent for creating pictures that 

are convincing as pictures. Astonishingly, her photography knows no lows, only heights, no 

age-related fatigue, but instead quality over nearly five decades. It has been mature from the 

very start. Unquestionably, the photographic œuvre of Barbara Klemm is among the great 

achievements in the medium in the twentieth century. If there were a pantheon of 

photography, the German cosmopolitan Barbara Klemm would deserve a box seat. 

Translation: Amy Klement 

Notes 

1 Quoted in Helmut Gebhard, “Barbara Klemm und die photographische ‘Entwaffnung der Welt,’” in: Jahrbuch der 

Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste, no. 15 (2000/2001), p. 556. 

2 Martin Mosebach, “Sie war der süße, schwarztriefende Kern,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 14, 2001. 

3 See “Barbara Klemm in Conversation with Matthias Flügge,” in Barbara Klemm – Light and Dark: Photographs 

from Germany (Nuremberg, 2010), p. 163. 

4 See Durs Grünbein, “Laudatio auf Barbara Klemm” (on the occasion her receiving the German Pour le mérite 

order on May 29, 2011). 

5 On this, see Arno Widmann, “Willkommen im Club! Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hat ein neues Gesicht,” 

in Frankfurter Rundschau, October 6, 2007. 

6 Freddy Langer, “Wenn die Kunst das Leben Pause machen läßt,” in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 

24, 2009. 

7 Quoted in Verena Lueken, “Wie haben Sie das gemacht, Frau Klemm?” in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 

December 24, 2009. 

8 Quoted in Barbara Klemm/Claus Heinrich Meyer, “Die Kunst, sich unsichtbar zu machen,” in: Jahrbuch der 

Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste, no. 15 (2000/2001), p. 569. 

9 Ibid., p. 568. 

10 Jean-Christophe Ammann, “Barbara Klemm,” flyer for the exhibition in the Museum für Moderne Kunst 

Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main, 1990). 

11 Hans-Michael Koetzle’s conversation with Barbara Klemm in Frankfurt am Main on April 19, 2013. 


12 See Manfred Sack, “Bewegung, in Form gebracht,” in: Die Zeit, March 16, 1984. 

13 Quoted in Lueken 2009, “Wie haben Sie das gemacht, Frau Klemm?” (see note 7). 

14 See Nuremberg 2010 (see note 3) p. 163. 

15 See Sack 1984 (see note 12). 

16 Christoph Stölzl, “Vorwort,” in: Barbara Klemm, “Unsere Jahre: Bilder aus Deutschland 1968–1998” (Munich, 

1999), p. 11. 

17 See Nuremberg 2010 (see note 3) p. 163. 

18 See “‘Ich habe nie den Anspruch gehabt, Kunst zu machen’: Barbara Klemm im Gespräch mit Matthias 

Flügge und Michael Freitag,” in: Neue Bildende Kunst, no. 6 (1999), p. 37. 

19 Ibid., p. 35. 

20 Quoted in Klemm/Meyer 2000 / 2001 (see note 8), p. 580. 

21 See note 18, p. 35. 

22 Quoted in Lueken 2009 (see note 7). 

23 Ibid. 

24 Barbara Catoir, “Bilder von Gehenden, Sitzenden, Wartenden: Die Reportagefotografie von Barbara Klemm” 

(Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 22. 

25 Ingo Schulze, “Sich selbst auf der Reise sehen,” in: Barbara Klemm, “Künstlerporträts” (Berlin, 2004), p. 9. 

26 Munich 1999 (see note 16), p. 10. 

27 Frankfurt am Main 1990 (see note 10). 

28 Barbara Catoir, “Laboratorien der Kreativität: Künstler aus der Sicht einer Fotografin,” in Barbara Klemm, 

“Künstler: Fotografien 1968–2011” (Wädenswil, 2012), p. 158. 

29 Quoted in Dirk Becker, “Schönheiten in Schwarz-Weiss,” in: Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, September 5, 

2009. 

30 On this in detail, see Hans-Michael Koetzle/Carsten M. Wolff, “Fleckhaus: Deutschlands erster Art Director” 

(Munich, 1997), pp. 122-124. 

31 Ibid. 

32 See Andreas Platthaus, “Ihr lächelt die Welt zu,” in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 24, 2009. 

33 Lueken 2009 (see note 7). 

34 See François Truffaut, Mr. Hitchcock, wie haben Sie das gemacht?— German title of the book, published in 

1973, which was released in English as Hitchcock: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock (New York, 1984). 

35 See Jürgen Leinemann, “It Looks Staged, But is in Fact Real Life: Photojournalists Provide Enlightenment,” in: 

Zeitsprung/Leap in Time: Erich Salomon – Barbara Klemm (Stuttgart, 2007), p. 21. 

36 See Wilfried Wiegand, “Unsere Jahre: Barbara Klemm fotografiert deutsche Augenblicke,” in: Frankfurter 

Allgemeine Magazin, no. 1003, May 21, 1999, p. 30. 

37 Ibid. 

38 Munich 1999 (see note 16), p. 10. 

39 Ursula Zeller, “Das Bild der Wirklichkeit als das Offenbare,” in: Nuremberg 2010 (see note 3), p. 15. 

40 See Wiegand 1999 (see note 36), p. 19. 

41 Quoted in Rose-Maria Gropp, “Die Welt kann ihre Bilder lesen,” in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 

31, 2004. 

42 Andrzej Szczypiorski, “Vorwort,” in: Barbara Klemm, “Blick nach Osten 1970–1995” (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 

p. 5. 

43 Wädenswil 2012 (see note 28), p. 158. 


45 Quoted in: Manfred Sack, “Ereignis und Eingebung eines Augenblicks: Die Photographin Barbara Klemm und 

ihre ‘Bilder’,” in: Die Zeit, no. 49, November 28, 1986. 


47 Ibid. 

48 Wilfried Wiegand, “Barbara Klemm’s Künstlerporträts,” in: Berlin 2004 (see note 25), p. 15. 

49 Ellen Auerbach, “Vorwort,” in: Barbara Klemm, “Bilder” (Frankfurt am Main, 198 


6. Education programme (only in German) 



Workshops für Schüler und Schulklassen 

Ein Album der Weltgeschichte 

Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele 

Martin-Gropius-Bau | Niederkirchnerstr. 7 | 10963 Berlin 

Mittwoch bis Montag von 10 bis 19 Uhr geöffnet. Dienstags geschlossen 

Anmeldung Vermittlungsprogramm: 


Tel. +49 (0)30 / 247 49-888; Fax +49 (0)30 / 247 49-883 

www.gropiusbau.de/schuelerprogramm 

Unterrichtsmaterial zur Ausstellung unter: 

www.fazschule.net 

Über Jahrzehnte hat Barbara Klemm für die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung fotografiert und 

dabei auch deutsch-deutsche Geschichte dokumentiert. Sie hat den Alltag der Menschen in 

den 1970er und 1980er Jahre und ihr Leben mit der Mauer festgehalten. Sie hat 

Wendepunkte der Geschichte für die nächsten Generationen konserviert: Willy Brandt und 

Breschnew bei den Ostvertragsverhandlungen 1973, Demonstrationen gegen die 

Startbahnwest 1981, Joschka Fischer in weißen Turnschuhen bei seiner Vereidigung im 

Hessischen Landtag 1985, Erich Honecker 1987 bei seinem ersten Staatsbesuch in der 

Bundesrepublik, Gorbatschow einen Monat vor dem Mauerfall im Bad der Menge zum 40. 

Jahrestag der DDR und Menschen am 10. November 1989, dicht gedrängt auf dem breiten 

Rand der Berliner Mauer stehend im Freudentaumel. Bilder, die Stimmungen und 

Befindlichkeiten der Protagonisten so sensibel und treffend zeigen, dass sie ganze 

Erzählungen beinhalten. 

Ihre Aufnahmen bringen uns aber auch fremde Kontinente und unbekannte Menschen in 

Indien, China, Amerika und Europa näher sowie internationale Stars der Kunst-, Musik- und 

Literaturszene: Mick Jagger singend als Frontmann der Rolling Stones, Joseph Beuys beim 

Aufbau seiner Installation „Hirschdenkmäler“ im Martin-Gropius-Bau, Andy Warhol in 

Frankfurt vor dem berühmten Goethe-Gemälde von Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Die 

Ausstellung ist ein komprimiertes Album der Weltgeschichte der letzten vier Jahrzehnte. 

Und: es geht dem Geheimnis guter Bilder nach. 

Pressemappe: Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 – 2013 page 25

Workshop 1 

Portrait-Erzählung 

Redaktionen haben Heißhunger auf Portraits. So schießen Bildreporter möglichst viele 

Portraits bekannter Personen. Das Besondere dieser Aufnahmen ist, dass sie dabei auch ein 

Stück Zeitgeschichte festhalten. Portraitfotos sind Erzählungen. Sie berichten von einem 

Menschen, dem der Fotograf begegnet ist. Den Nuancen zwischen Schnappschuss und 

Portraitaufnahme, zwischen Pose und im Gespräch entstandener Fotografie kommen wir 

beim Ausstellungsbesuch auf die Spur bevor wir in Kleingruppen eigene Portraits erzählen 

lassen... 

Workshops für Schulklassen. Nach Vereinbarung / max. 30 SchülerInnen 

Öffentliche Workshops: Sonntag, 15.12. und Freitag 27.12.2013, 13-15 Uhr, keine Gebühr, 

Anmeldung empfohlen (begrenzte Teilnehmerzahl). 

Workshop 2 

Zeitgeschichte 

40 Jahre lang bestand die Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Dann überschlugen sich 1989 

die politischen und gesellschaftlichen Ereignisse. Im Frühjahr 1989 entwickelte sich eine 

Bürgerrechtsbewegung in der DDR, der sich bis zum November 1989 Hunderttausende 

anschlossen. Bis heute zählt der Fall der Mauer zum wichtigsten Kapitel im 

Nachkriegsdeutschland. Es war ein mutiger Kampf, den die Bürger der ehemaligen DDR mit 

ihren Demonstrationen geführt haben. Bis heute zeichnen Mauerreste und in eine im Boden 

eingelassene Erinnerungslinie die Mauer nach. Auch der Martin-Gropius-Bau stand 

unmittelbar an der Mauer. In unserer Atelierarbeit, die wir auf den Außenraum des Martin- 

Gropius-Baus verlagern, fotografieren wir Menschen, während wir sie nach diesem wichtigen 

Ereignis befragen. Es entsteht eine Reportage in Wort und Bild. 


Öffentliche Workshops: Sonntag, 24.11. und 29.12.2013, 13-15 Uhr, keine Gebühr, 

Anmeldung empfohlen (begrenzte Teilnehmerzahl). 

Workshop 3 

Komposition und Inhalt 

Die Mutter war Bildhauerin, der Vater Maler, die Tochter wurde eine mit vielen Preisen 

international ausgezeichnete Fotografin. Barbara Klemm lernte von ihren Eltern, was ein 

gutes Werk ausmacht und übertrug es in die Fotografie. Ihr geht es weniger um Perfektion 

als um Inhalt, Atmosphäre, Tiefe und Komposition. Die Komposition macht ein gutes Bild 

aus. Doch der Fotograf muss die Komposition aus der Bewegung heraus erfassen. Eine 

Kunst, die ein geschultes Auge fordert und wir Euch nahe bringen möchten… 


Öffentliche Workshops: Sonntag, 12.1. und 2.3.2014, 13-15 Uhr, keine Gebühr, Anmeldung 

empfohlen (begrenzte Teilnehmerzahl). 

Workshop 4 

Für Einsteiger 

Das Geheimnis eines guten Bildes erläutert eine Fotografin/ein Fotograf anhand der 

Aufnahmen von Barbara Klemm in sieben Schritten. Die kleine Fotoschule beantwortet u.a. 

folgende Fragen: Was macht ein gutes Foto aus? Wie lichte ich am besten bewegte Dinge 

ab? Gibt es Regeln für den Aufbau von Bildern? Worauf muss ich achten, wenn ich 

Menschen fotografiere? Wie nehme ich Gebäude, Landschaften, Straßen auf? Was bedeutet 


Schärfentiefe, was Brennweite und muss ich mich mit beiden befassen? Der Workshop mit 

Theorie- und Praxisteil beantwortet die Frage: Wie mache ich ein gutes Foto? 


Öffentliche Workshops: Sonntag, 19.1.2014, 13-15 Uhr, keine Gebühr, Anmeldung 

empfohlen (begrenzte Teilnehmerzahl). 

11 – 17 Jahre 

MGB SchülerUni 

Ein Gespräch zwischen Klaus Staeck, Künstler und Präsident der Akademie der Künste, und 

Barbara Klemm. 

Öffentlichkeit ist eine wesentliche Kategorie der Demokratie. Öffentlichkeit entsteht durch 

Presse und auch durch Kunst über die geschrieben und diskutiert wird. Barbara Klemm zählt 

zu den wichtigen Reportagefotografen im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Klaus Staeck war schon 

immer ein Querdenker. Er hat auf dem Bau gearbeitet, Jura studiert und wurde als Künstler 

und Verleger mit seinem Verlag „Edition Tangente“ berühmt. Er verlegte bekannte Künstler 

wie Joseph Beuys und publizierte sozialkritisch-ironische Plakate und Postkarten. Von 

seinen Anhängern wird er als Gewissen der Bundesrepublik gefeiert. Ein Gespräch über 

Geschichtsereignisse und Momente, in denen Bilder großes bewirken. 

Zum Programm sind SchülerInnen der 6. bis 12. Klassen d.h. 11 – 17 Jährige im 

Klassenverband und deren Lehrkräfte eingeladen. Die Vorträge sind gekoppelt mit einer 

anschließenden Führung durch die Ausstellung. Dauer der Vorlesung und Führung jeweils 

etwa 60 min., Anmeldung erforderlich, begrenzte Teilnahme. 

Mittwoch, 11.12.2013, 10.30 Uhr, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Kinosaal 

MGB Kunst² 

MGB Kunst² steht für eine intensive und nachhaltige, zwei Jahre lang monatlich stattfindende 

Kulturarbeit mit Berliner Schulen. Das Lernen in den Ausstellungen wird zum festen 

Bestandteil des Unterrichts. Die Schüler besuchen Ausstellungen, führen Gespräche mit 

Künstlern und Kuratoren und kreieren eigene Werke im Atelier. MGB Kunst² ist für 

Schulklassen kostenlos. 

Beratung und Bewerbungen an: organisation@gropiusbau.de 

MGB Impuls² wird ermöglicht durch 

MGB Kunst² durch 

Ort: Martin-Gropius-Bau. Niederkirchnerstr. 7, 10963 Berlin, www.gropiusbau.de 

Öffnungszeiten: Mittwoch bis Montag, 10-19 Uhr, dienstags geschlossen 

Kostenlose Lehrerführung: 

Donnerstag, 21.11.2013, 17 Uhr, Anmeldung erforderlich 

Öffentliche Workshops (für SchülerInnen ab 5 Jahren): siehe Veranstaltungstermine, 

kostenlos, begrenzte Teilnehmerzahl, Anmeldung empfohlen 

Angemeldete Workshops für Schulklassen: € 80 je Gruppe, Klassenstärke (bis zu 30 

SchülerInnen) 


Beratung & Anmeldung: Museumsinformation Berlin, Tel. 030-247 49.888, 

Fax 030-247 49.883, museumsinformation@kulturprojekte-berlin.de, www.museumsdienstberlin.de 


7. Factsheet 



Opening times: 

Wednesday to Monday 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., closed Tue 

Special opening times: open on every holiday, except 24 December and 31 December 

Organizer: 

Berliner Festspiele. 

Partner: 

Wall AG, BTM – Visit Berlin, Dussmann – Das KulturKaufhaus, The Mandala 

Media partners: 

FAZ 

Tagesspiegel, Zitty, Exberliner, Fotoforum, Cicero, Rolling Stone 

RBB inforadio 

Public Relations Office, Martin-Gropius-Bau: 

Katrin Mundorf, tel. +49 (0)30 25486-112, fax: +49 (0)30 25486-107 

E-mail: organisation@gropiusbau.de 

Catalogue: 

Publisher: NIMBUS. Kunst und Bücher 

Museums edition: € 29 

Trade edition (German/English) € 48 

(ISBN 978-3-907142-93-6) 

Admission 

€ 9 / reduced rate € 6 

Admission free for those aged 16 or under 

Groups of 5 or more 

€ 6 per person / reduced rate: € 4 per person 

Combination tickets at favourable rates available at the cash desk 

Online tickets: www.gropiusbau.de 

Public guided tours 

Sundays at 3 p.m. (without advance booking) 

More at: www.gropiusbau.de 

Booked guided tours 

For groups: Guided tours in German (60 min.) € 60 plus € 6 admission per person 

For school and student groups (60 min.) € 45 plus € 4 admission per person 

For guided tours in other languages: € 10 extra 


Parallel to the exhibition freely bookable and public workshops are held for school classes, 

children and young people aged 5 and over. 

Public Workshops for young people aged 5 and over and for families 

Friday 27.12., Sundays 29.12., 12.1., 19.1., 2.3.2014. The workshops begin at 1 p.m. and 

are free of charge. 

More information at: www.gropiusbau.de/schuelerprogramm 

Advice and booking for guided tours and workshops 

MuseumsInformation Berlin 

Tel. +49 (0)30 / 24749-888, fax +49 (0)30 / 24749-883 


www.museumsdienst-berlin.de 


8. Partners & Sponsors 

Barbara Klemm. Fotografien 1968 – 2013 

16. November 2013 bis 9. März 2014 

Organizers: 

The exhibition is enabled by: 

Partner: 

Media partner: 


Attachments 



Catalogue 


Information Wall AG 

Education programme (only in German) 

Flyer 

Poster 

Press kit: Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968 – 2013

N I M B U S . 

K U N S T U N D BÜCHER 

V I L L A Z U M A B E N D S T E R N 

V I L L A Z U M ABENDSTERN 

O K T O B E R 2013 

Barbara Klemm 

Photographs 1968 - 2013 

For more than 40 years, Barbara Klemm was at the flashpoint of current affairs. As 

a photographer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, she witnessed numerous 

defining moments of the epoch: Willy Brandt in talks with Leonid Brezhnev in 

1973, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, Pope John Paul II on his first 

Polish trip in the years of Solidarno!", Mikhail Gorbachev at the 40th anniversary of 

the GDR in East Berlin, 1989, an elated V‡clav Havel at Prague Castle in 1990, 

the fall of the Wall, and German reunification. 

Many others photographed these moments too, but Barbara Klemm shot the 

images that have been etched into our collective memory. She travelled around 

Eastern Europe and Russia when this was only possible with severe restrictions; 

she took photographs of South Africa during the apartheid era; her pictures of 

famine in the Sahel region shook up the Western world; in Chile, she waited for 

hours for the dictator Pinochet to drive past, capturing him in a revealing shot 

during that brief moment. She documented the clash of social contrasts in New 

York and the loneliness of gamblers in Las Vegas. 

Barbara Klemm has always focussed her attention on people Ð accordingly, the 

medium of the portrait is where her greatest passion lies. In her pictures of artists, 

musicians and writers, Barbara Klemm traces the most prominent features of each 

personality and unites experiences that are usually felt to be contradictory: the 

comŽdie humaine and the human condition. 

This volume of work will be published to accompany a wide-ranging retrospective 

exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, and offers a fascinating cross 

section of Barbara KlemmÕs unique opus. 

Barbara Klemm 

Photographs 1968-2013 

320 pages with 250 plates in duotone 

and texts by Hans-Michael Koetzle and Durs GrŸnbein 

clothbound hardcover with dust jacket 

CHF 64,00 Euro 48,00 

ISBN 978-3-907142-93-6 

BÜRGLISTRASSE 37, CH 8820 WÄDENSWIL AM ZÜRICHSEE 

T [++41] (0)44-680 37 04, F [++41] (0)44-680 37 03, MOBIL: [++41] (0)79-663 49 06 

verlag@nimbusbooks.ch, www.nimbusbooks.ch

October 2013 


15 March - 22 June 2014 

Wols Photograph 

Organizer: Berliner Festspiele. An exhibition of Kupferstich-Kabinett der Staatlichen 

Kunstsammlung Dresden. 

27 March - 30 June 2014 

Hans Richter - Encounters 

Organizer: Berliner Festspiele. In cooperation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

(LACMA) and the Centre Pompidou Metz. 

3 April - 7 July 2014 

Ai Weiwei 

Organizer: Berliner Festspiele 

1 August - 2 November 2014 

Die Welt um 1914 

Farbfotografie vor dem Großen Krieg 

Albert Kahn, Sergej M. Prokudin-Gorskii, Adolf Miethe. 

Organizer: Berliner Festspiele. A cooperation project of LVR-LandesMuseums Bonn and 

Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. 

The Martin-Gropius-Bau is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture 

and Media 

________________________________________________________________________________ 

Martin-Gropius-Bau am Potsdamer Platz / Information/ Exhibitions 2012/2013, page: 1 

Changes possible / Opening Hours: We – Mo 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., closed on Tuesday; S-Bahn: Anhalter Bahnhof / Potsdamer 

Platz, U-Bahn: Potsdamer Platz / Date of Print: 07.11.2013

Company Profile – Wall AG 

Wall AG. For Cities. For People. 

Wall AG is an international specialist in street furniture and outdoor advertising and part of 

JCDecaux SA Group, the number 1 in outdoor advertising worldwide. 

Founded in 1976, Wall AG shapes the public space with future-proof street furniture, 

collaborating with renowned architects and designers. Self-cleaning, handicapped-accessible City- 

Toilets, waiting shelters, city information panels, functional pillars, kiosks and high-quality 

advertising displays are manufactured in the company-owned production plant at Velten in 

Brandenburg. Wall's street furniture products are provided to cities free of charge. The company's 

investment is refinanced through marketing the integrated advertising panels. Up to now, Wall 

has developed more than 28 different design-lines for the urban space. 

Wall is committed to a "single-source-philosophy". Development and manufacturing, cleaning and 

maintenance of street furniture as well as the marketing of advertising spaces rest exclusively in 

the hands of Wall AG. Wall's products and services are distinguished by innovation, quality and 

sustainability. 

Wall's business model opens up new chances and spaces not only for partner cities, but also for 

outdoor advertising. Advertising displays by Wall pinpoint the medial advantages: Wall premium 

advertising panels are distinguished by their highly frequented locations in public squares and 

streets, their eye-catching size and their convincing quality of exposure. Marketing focuses on 

class, not mass: Wall relies on superior quality to speak for itself. 

Since January 2011, Wall AG and JCDecaux Deutschland GmbH are jointly marketing their 

advertising spaces in more than 60 German cities – including all of Germany's million-strong cities 

– under the sales brand WallDecaux Premium Outdoor Sales as a division of Wall AG. 

Wall-Group – Key Facts: 

! International street furniture supplier and outdoor advertiser in Germany and Turkey 

! Part of the international JC Decaux cooperation – the number one in outdoor advertising 

worldwide 

! Innovative street furniture in highest quality design; 28 different design-lines 

! Made to measure solutions provided by in-house research and development unit 

! Single-source production, cleaning and maintenance guarantee highest quality standards 

! Intelligent outdoor advertising on more than 93,300 high profile advertising spaces, 

including 6,635 advertising spaces on means of transportation such as tramways, busses, 

underground trains and trucks 

! Sales division WallDecaux Premium Outdoor Sales with five regional sales-offices in 

Germany ensures national marketing competence 

! Largest national provider of City Light Poster (CLP) format advertising displays in Germany 

! Marketing-portfolio in Germany: analogue and digital advertising displays in about 60 

cities, AirportNet, ShoppingNet, Leipzig Central Station, Berlinale International Film 

Festival, Smartphone-App U snap, bluespot, RollAd truck advertising medium, as well as 

transit advertising in Berlin, including all underground stations 

! Number of employees: 1.067 (as at March 28, 2013)

Barbara Klemm. Photographs 1968–2013 - Berliner Festspiele

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