Karin Székessy Exhibition in Hamburg

28 July, 2008 by bdimitrov

The job is consuming lots and lots of my time lately, but yesterday I had a short breather, so I visited Karin Székessy’s exhibition Photography in Hamburg’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. The closing date is Aug 31, so if you are planing a visit, don’t wait too long.

I could only find one or two images by Karin Székessy on the Internet beforehand, so my expectations were based solely on the black and white shadow portrait on the exhibition’s poster. This is the same image that you can see below on the cover of Karin’s book Photography. I find this image very appealing and very strong, so I was hoping for a very good show. I was definitely not disappointed, but since most images are quite different from this one, my expectations were not quite met.

The exhibit contains about 240 photographs and a significant portion of those are female nudes. These seem to be the main focus of Karin’s long career, although a number of images depicting dogs, plants, reportage and landscapes are also on display. Amongst the many are black-and-whites and a few dark and somewhat gloomy color images. About half of the images are posed and the other half are quite spontaneous. Many photographs contain some form of motion blur.

Interspersed amongst the large prints are huge contact prints of entire film rolls that give an insight into the shooting style of the artist.