Published in 2000 by Galerie Bodo Niemann
Freed bodies - Nude photographs by Gerhard Riebicke 1924 -1932
Written by T.O. Immisch
Freed bodies? Perhaps not yet quite this, but still bodies that are freeing themselves. In the twentieth century the freeing of bodies, corporeality, and sensuality was tried again and again, rarely achieved and often prevented. In Riebicke's pictures it looks as if this was accomplished, for one historical moment.
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What we have here before us is one of the rather rare cases of nude photography paired with humor. These pictures are witness to and part of a historical naturism which still accentuated both: the leap to freedom (from narrowing conventions to self-acceptance) and the culture, the careful attention to, and the practicing of bodily expression.
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Riebicke's pictures give a sudden insight into the striving for a free community, already beyond the pseudo-religious sun-worshippers a la Fidus but not yet on the same level with the ungainly Kraftdurch-Freude Aryans. The pair and group configurations and figures do not force the bodies neatly in row, do not force them into poses of strength or into poses of idyllic round dances. In these, the bodies of those involved relate to each other, the protagonists clasping each other's limbs. Their bodies neither show deformation nor formation (and the photographer is showing it in his pictures), but rather form and forms, the forms of their own bodies and forms of joint action. Specific for photography and especially remarkable in these snapshots is that they make visible configurations of parts of the body in relation to each other, which cannot be seen in that way during the action. Individuals, two or more people, materialize in one single form, or rather form an ornament. Thus, form is becoming visible in its double meaning, as human figure(s) and as an entity which is more than the sum of its parts.
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It is fascinating to see and to look into how the photographer is stretching these bodily ornaments across the landscape. People and land or water are joined together in a composition and by choosing the angle of view (mainly turned to the object slightly from the top or from the bottom), the horizon, the line between sky and lake or meadow, becomes part of the pictorial figure, becomes graphically flat and is inscribed in the hieroglyphs of the movements.
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Riebicke's nude photographs are both records of stagings, self-stagings of the people photographed, and staged records, intensified in their fire, their being detached from gravity by photographic means, such as detail selection, the supremely fine play with light-dark contrasts or slightly low visibility. As conscious of the form as they are seen and made, they appear at times almost report-like. The staged action comes from the protagonists themselves, is recorded and intensified by the photographer and still remains in motion, and does not congeal into formulas.
Untitled, 1925
Untitled, 1925
Untitled, 1926
Untitled, 1926
Untitled, 1926
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925
