The impermanence of memory.

THIRD HAMBURG PHOTOGRAPHY TRIENNIAL 

HAMBURG, GERMANY

APRIL 14-JUNE 19, 2005

When is a photography festival a photography festival? It depends, as [former United States President] Bill Clinton put it so eloquently, on what the meaning of "it" is. The word festival means "solemn" or a "holiday" (from holy-day) often celebrated with food, hence a feast. In this case, the Third Hamburg Photography Triennial was indeed a feast for the eyes, with more than 80 exhibitions taking place across the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg over a period of two months.

However, if a photography festival is considered to be an event based around a central theme, this was no festival; it was instead a celebration, a word that means "any solemn ceremony." While this event took place under the rubric of "Archive of the Present" it was also during the same months of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps. In a city that received the first "scientific" firebombing, "Operation Gomorrah," at the hands of the Royal Air Force in 1943, it is unfortunate that none of the various museums or galleries addressed this historical, archival topic directly. This is also noteworthy because the many research institutes in the city have addressed historical themes, most notably the Institute for Social Research's landmark exhibition of atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany's armed forces, "Crimes of the Wehrmacht," and because Hamburg, the site of Germany's printed media industry, has among the finest newspaper and magazine archives in the world. For a festival collated under the theme of "Archive of the Present," this was especially unfortunate. It seems to speak not of Dali's "Persistence of Memory," but to an impermanence of memory.

That said, the Hamburg Photography Triennial was important and time-worthy for lovers of photography everywhere for three reasons. First and foremost, this Triennial launched Germany's first dedicated photography museum, the House of Photography/Deichtorhallen, in a former market hall close to Hamburg's waterways. The collection of more than 3,000,000 prints available for study and exhibition, grounded by fashion photographer and photojournalist F. C. Grundlach's personal collection, is also the new site of the news magazine Der Spiegel's own wide-ranging archive.

Secondly, the opening show at the House of Photography was a long overdue retrospective on the work of the groundbreaking photojournalist Martin Munkacsi (1896-1963). Entitled "Think While You Shoot," the exhibition covered the entire gamut of Munkacsi's career, from his earliest works in Hungary where he was a near contemporary of Brassai and Andre Kertesz, through his brilliant journalism and fashion shots of Berlin in the 1920s and early '30s to his ongoing fashion and reportage work in New York and Southern France in the postwar years. Munkacsi brought a fashion and Bauhaus-inflected sensibility to his photojournalism. His work was part of the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement of the 1920s and '30s and was remarkably prescient in its awareness of the possibilities of the mass media and, by contrast, of the possibilities of abuse by those in power. His work from the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung from 1932-34 was seminal in raising the awareness of what the Nazi party would later do in Germany and Europe. His 1929 photograph "Die Kinder von Bad Kissingen," of children sunning themselves on a lawn, recalls the battlefields of World War I and predicts those that would come 10 years later. The beautifully eerie image of a motorcyclist splashing his way through mud reflects Jacques-Henri Lartigue's famous images of speed and is a triumph of the small-format camera. Yet the highest tribute to his work was paid by none other than Henri Cartier-Bresson, who said that the first photograph that inspired him to imagine what photography could do was Munkacsi's image of three boys dashing into the surf on the Liberian coast (c. 1932). It is both an elegantly composed statement and an example of what later would be called "the decisive moment."

The third reason to praise this celebration of photography was a wonderful show of Surrealist photography, "The Gaze of Desire," at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. Beyond the well-known images of Hans Bellmer, Brassai, Andre Breton, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Man Ray and Wols, there were a host of rarities from lesser-known artists. Bellmer's famous Poupee series was accompanied by a remarkable, carte-de-visite-sized edition (of one piece from the series) and hand-colored works as well. Works by Eli Lotar and Jindrich Styrsky, the latter from Berlin's famous Galerie Berinson, are remarkable examples of the Surrealists' way of finding magic in the everyday. With countless documentary materials and other texts, this show was a remarkable tour de force and represents a new perspective on the study of Surrealism.

Beyond the two shows that centered the Hamburg Triennial, several other smaller shows gave testimony to the possibilities that this celebration could have been better coordinated. An installation at Kunsthaus Hamburg, regrettably not open when this author visited, depicted Wilhemine Germany's colonial experiences and attitudes towards racism in German Southwest Africa, today's Namibia. It represents a collection of images that stress Germany's colonial achievements to those at home. On the other hand, its racial attitudes recall the cliches from America's south in the post-Civil War period.

Scattered throughout the city there were also images from various collections and galleries that somehow honored Hamburg's archives and position as a fashion and media center. Monika Mohr Galerie showed a retrospective of Lillian Bassman's notable fashion plates, to be followed by a show of Sheila Metzner's work. Elsewhere, there were shows of classic photography by Erich Salomon and Robert Capa and from the Cuban Revolution, as well as from younger photographers.

Regrettably, from an organizational standpoint and from that of the informed viewer, the Triennial was unmanageable. It was not conceived to make it rise above the sum of its, admittedly very good, parts. To be sure, some of the exhibitions are fun, intelligent and informative, but with shows and openings scattered all over town and over more than two months, it has no center, and no one, other than those actually living in Hamburg, can make the best of it. This third Triennial was a great "what might have been" event that, if better co-ordinated and more tightly curated, might well have risen to be something spectacular. Fortunately, there is still time to put together the next version.

BILL KOUWENHOVEN is a writer and photographer and was editor of Photo Metro from 1997-2001. He lives and works in Berlin and New York City.