COLOGNE.- The Museum Ludwig holds an outstanding collection of photographs encompassing some 70,000 works from the beginning of photography in the nineteenth century to the present. Now parts of the Photographic Collection are being showcased in a special Photography Room within the permanent collection of the Museum Ludwig in an effort to gradually present the collection. The room provides the Museum Ludwig with a permanent space dedicated to photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Heinz Held: People with Pictures is the title of the first presentation, which will be on view until August 20. The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) and the Cologne-based photographer Heinz Held (1918–1990) met several times: In 1956, when Cartier-Bresson traveled to Cologne, where his pictures were shown at the photokina fair, Heinz Held not only assisted in installing the exhibition but also photographed it. It is likely that they also met at the house of their mutual friend L. Fritz Gruber, the founder and head of the photokina exhibitions. We do not know what they talked about, but they shared a similar approach to photography: using a small camera, strolling around unnoticed, and waiting for the moment when something unexpected, touching, or funny would happen—usually unnoticed by the persons photographed. Cartier-Bresson called this the “decisive moment.”
In 1967 the Kunsthalle Köln organized a solo exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s work. The corpus of around two hundred photographs mounted on wooden panels is now part of the Museum Ludwig’s Photographic Collection and was last shown in its entirety on the occasion of Cartier-Bresson’s death in 2004. The estate of Heinz Held is now also part of the Museum Ludwig and currently the focus of research. Embracing the spectrum of both their oeuvres, this exhibition presents images of people in museums and cities. The paintings, sculptures, posters, or street signs in these images often enter into a dialogue with their viewers or passersby. Cartier-Bresson identified the surreal potential of photography in this sort of correspondence, and Heinz Held characterized it as a “magic” that “stirs the heart.”
To expand the museum's exhibition area, the museum also simultaneously opened the PHOTO LAB, a space in which children and adults can participate and experiment. Visitors will be able to experience how a camera obscura—the original camera—works, pose in front of a photo mural, or put together their own exhibition using fifty reproductions from the Photographic Collection. These reproductions were provided by Pixum, an online photo service based in Cologne. This space will animate the Museum Ludwig’s Photographic Collection in a number of ways while also making it more accessible.
The digitization of the collection in a scholarly database for researchers is another important part of the work of the museum’s Photographic Collection. Thanks to the generous support of Pixum, the Museum Ludwig has been able to digitize 4,000 photographs from the Agfa Collection in the last two years. These will be available online starting this week. The Photographic Collection will be published sequentially, in sections, at www.kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de, making it accessible to everyone. The digitization will continue with the Gruber Collection, the acquisitions of the Museum Ludwig, and the Mrazkowa Collection, and will also be supported by Pixum for the next two years.
