He's one Germany's most important photographers: Stefan Moses explored everyday life in his homeland as if it were an "exotic country" — which is also the title of a new exhibition at Berlin's German Historical Museum.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
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'The Exotic Country': Stefan Moses' photographic journey through Germany
His portraits of societal subcultures made him one of Germany's most famous photographers in the 1960s. A new Stefan Moses retrospective showcases images from the photo series' that chronicled postwar Germany.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/lsw
High Society (1961)
Stefan Moses (1928-2018) liked to explore his subjects via unusual perspectives: for example, the back view of these well-heeled visitors to the Bayreuth Festival in 1961 exposed a lot more than a frontal shot. After escaping a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, Moses worked as a freelance photojournalist, and cemented his unique portraiture style while working at "Stern" magazine from 1960-1968.
Image: Elsa Bechteler-Moses
Loading up (1964)
The hunt for delicacies at a buffet was almost like a sporting event in West Germany during the post-war economic boom. Germans had begun celebrating again — working hard and playing hard. Here, the photographer wasn't interested in technical perfection for such snapshots; he wanted to capture the dynamics of the action. The DHM is showing mainly his early reportage works.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
Adenauer and Brandt (1961)
Here former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer is sporting cool Ray Ban sunglasses he brought back from his last state visit to the US. The CDU politician was meeting with SPD party leader Willy Brandt (right) at the 1961 annual meeting of Silesians. At least 12 million ethnic Germans had to flee their homes after WWII, and the expellees were an important constituency for the two political parties.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
A royal occasion (1962)
As a portrait specialist, Moses was less interested in capturing the ultimate "magic moment" than telling a bigger narrative in photo essay form. In the 1960s, he created long-term photographic series and cycles like "Die Alten" ("The Elderly"). This image from the 1962 series captures royal devotees camping out in London while waiting for the Queen's parade.
Image: Elsa Bechteler-Moses
Fish packers (1964)
Moses' photographic series "Ostdeutsche Portraits" ("East German Portraits") was originally commissioned by the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin to show on the occasion of the institution's opening in 1991. The agreed one-month photo assignment in the former GDR went for much longer as Moses, always drawn to the working classes, became fascinated by the independent pride of East Germans.
Image: Elsa Bechteler-Moses
Woman with a hat (1960s)
As a professional photographer, Stefan Moses preferred to stay in the background. He didn't like models posing in front of the camera. The facial expressions of those he photographed were essential to him, and he had a keen sense of comedy. People managed to feel unobserved as he captured them in their everyday actions, such as this woman trying on a fur hat.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
Beauty tips (undated)
Many of his mostly black-and-white photographs captured everyday life. Moses did not take pictures in a studio and instead hit the streets to capture what appeared to him as "typically German." Rather than travel to exotic countries for inspiration like many of his professional colleagues, this avid chronicler of 20th century Germany found endless material in his own backyard.
Image: Elsa Bechteler-Moses
Dressed to the nines (1960s)
The photographer was also on the road in the industrial Ruhr region, encountering the guys who did the hard work underground. "On Saturdays, Dad's with us" was the slogan of the trade unions back then who fought for a five-day work week. Moses studied the Sunday rituals of the mining families in detail. Here's a classic: father, mother, two children — dressed to the nines for a day in the city.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
Bathing beauty (1960s)
Free time was hardly an option in a six-day work week. That's why, during summer vacation, people in West Germany began traveling to the sunny South from the 1950s onwards, preferably to Italy, Spain or Greece. But you could also make it nice at home — at the campsite, for instance. Stefan Moses was on the scene.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
Jews in post-war Germany (1964)
His Jewish family roots gave Moses a very personal insight into the lives of Jews in Germany. The war was over, many of the Holocaust survivors had emigrated, but some stayed in Germany. Like those here: elderly residents of the Jewish old people's home in Würzburg.
Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
Documenting post-war Germany
Stefan Moses sought to document Germany's post-war recovery after so much terror and destruction. His ironic, observational snapshots were free of judgement and, in addition to capturing politics and society, included humorous everyday impressions. In his latest DHM exhibition, 250 photographs, magazines and books depict Moses' path from intrepid photojournalist to chronicler of a nation.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S.Pilick
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Ahead of the opening of Berlin's German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum, or DHM) back in 1991, Stefan Moses, already renowned as one of Germany's most famous portrait photographers since the 1960s, was commissioned to produces a series called "The East Germans."
Moses spent months traveling around the former GDR, getting to know the people whose lives had been most directly affected by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Placing factory workers, fish packers, mechanics, police officers, but also artists, pastors and writers in front of a grey felt cloth, he portrayed the faces of "the other Germany." It became one of the most important series of his oeuvre.
Now, in a exhibition titled "Exotic Country: Photo Reportages by Stefan Moses," the same museum revisits the work of the photographer who died a year ago on February 3, 2018.
Surviving the Nazi era
Stefan Moses was born on August 29, 1928, in Liegnitz, Silesia (today the Polish city of Legnica). Having two Jewish grandparents, he was labeled by the Nazis as "first-degree mixed race." In 1943, he was therefore banned from school and worked as an apprentice for photographer Grete Bodlée in Breslau until he was imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1944, which he survived by escaping.
After the end of World War II, Moses continued his apprenticeship and became a theater photographer in Weimar, which is also where he photographed Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann, a guest there on the occasion of Goethe's 200th birthday in 1949.
In 1950, Moses moved to Munich, where he worked as a photojournalist. He lived there until his death.
A master of nuance
Working in the tradition of pioneering German portrait photographer August Sander (1876-1964), creator of the famous "People of the 20th Century" series, Moses nevertheless developed his own style. His respectful and nuanced portraits, usually in black-and-white, are legendary.
The young photographer was a chronicler of his times, documenting through different series in the 1950s and 60s the snobbish nouveau riche of the West German Wirtschaftswunder, big city poverty or the seclusion of former German emigrants who had left Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.
His photos appeared in popular magazines such as the weekly Stern, and contributed to changing Germans' perception of society. Today, his works are contemporary historical documents.
First chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany: Konrad Adenauer in 1962Image: Else Bechteler-Moses
His black-and-white portrait of Chancellor Willy Brandt, alone in a snowy forest, is an icon of German photography. Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hilde Domin, Tilla Durieux, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Martin Walser and Botho Strauss are just some of the public figures he portrayed.
"Taking photos is remembrance work," Moses once said of his art. "Mine is to document people before they disappear."
The exhibition "The Exotic Country: Photo Reportages by Stefan Moses" is on show from February 1 through May 12, 2019 at the Deutsches Historiches Museum in Berlin.
