At first glance, the exhibition looks like a big, rough puzzle.

Animals, landscapes, nudes, buildings and event photographs, shots of maneuvers, expeditions, plants, naked youths and classic works of art hang next to each other, apparently at random.

The whole thing looks like the sale of a hastily presorted photographer's estate.

In fact, the photographic teaching collection of the Berlin University of the Arts has a certain inheritance character, because its twenty-five thousand pictures have hardly been used for ninety years.

Nothing is sold in the Berlin Museum of Photography, on the contrary, the Federal Ministry of Education donated a considerable amount as part of a funding program so that the collection could be inventoried and digitized.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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    At a second glance, one recognizes the first connections, lines of development, fragments of history in the confusion.

    For example the change from the pathetic architectural views of the photo pioneer Albrecht Meydenbauer, the founder of the Prussian Messbild-Anstalt, to the exquisite objectivity of Albert Renger-Patzsch.

    Or the jump from the landscape photographs of the middle and late nineteenth centuries, which were still indebted to the Barbizon school or Poussin's painting, to the scientifically sober plant studies that Karl Blossfeldt made from 1890 to the thirties.

    The photographer is always a contemporary witness

    The exhibition, which spreads its treasures more in silence than curatorily speaking, does not always make it easy to perceive such connections. But the more you see, the less it can be overlooked, because in contrast to the painter, the photographer is condemned to be a contemporary witness. He can, like Alfred Stieglitz or Wilhelm von Gloeden in their pictures from Italy, arrange his models in classic poses or himself as Christ, but in the end they speak of their date of creation: in the dirty feet and defiant expressions of the market women at Stieglitz, in the rich sweetness of the face between immaculately combed curly hair at Gloeden.

    Finally, you understand what the exhibition is really about: the perspective of an era. It is the time when photography was already omnipotent as an image medium, but not yet ennobled to art, and it ended almost exactly in those twenties of the last century, as did the Berlin University, which was then known as the “United State Schools for Free and applied art ”, stopped collecting. The aesthetic status of the photographs, the creators of which were not yet famous at the time, was further reduced by the fact that they were not used for edification but as a template for drawings, sculptures, paintings and everyday objects.

    But it is precisely this limitation that makes the picture puzzle particularly interesting, because it adds a counter-view of their customers to the photographer's gaze, it gives the choice of motifs a double historical character. We see at the same time what one saw then and what one wanted to artistically imitate of what was seen. Little of the art that emerged from these pictures has survived. Today it is the photographs that speak to us, not their copies in clay, oil paint and stone. Perhaps because in their play of light and shadow something is preserved that exceeds the artistic will of an individual. The language of things. The traces of time.