There are people who say junkyard about it. One could, however, find a place like the one that the odd Mr. Firmin in Dinard, the small coastal town in Brittany, used to have throughout his life on a huge area, surrounded by hedges and walls, between which all this towered and stacked in an almost impenetrable labyrinth, What people once meant a lot, but at some point was no longer useful to them, can also be called an archive. As an archive of life. As an archive of everyday life and the history of this very place. Because it's like moving through a lot of biographies there. Because all the objects were once a person's companions: the strollers, the small bicycles, the washtubs, the bathtubs, the toys, the furniture. The word:Treasury.
Freddy Langer
Editor in the features section, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".
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Benjamin Katz chose a photograph of this scrap yard as the cover picture of the catalog of his most recent exhibition: “Entdeckungen - Discoveries - Découvertes”, and one cannot help but draw a parallel to his decision to delve deep into his own for this presentation of his photographs Archive, his private treasury. And so this time he does not show a selection of his more than five hundred thousand artist portraits, which he took over the course of half a century while preparing exhibitions or opening galleries, during private visits to studios or during joint excursions, until they almost become one added a complete “Who's Who” of contemporary art and thus inscribed himself in the history of photography. Rather, Benjamin Katz was now looking for motifswhere he encountered his own idea of art in everyday life.
Often they were created while traveling, in France, Belgium and Greece, not infrequently on vacation, always carefree, without any stress, much perceived in passing. And yet the recordings are all shaped by an artistic perspective. More precisely: from a comprehensive knowledge of art history. Where others want the holiday pictures to be a reminder of beautiful days, at Katz they report on his memory of art. At the junkyard in Dinard, he immediately saw a bottle dryer, similar to the one with which Marcel Duchamp expanded the genre of plastic to include the ready-made in 1914.
A torn tarpaulin only covers half of the slats nailed vertically in front of a window, so that one thinks Daniel Buren designed it. Or one of the most famous photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson shimmers through the detail of an intricately designed staircase with its confused railing like a watermark, except that Katz is missing the cyclist. And so it goes on, whether Brassaï and Otto Steinert were the godfathers or Impressionism and color field painting. And when Benjamin Katz looked for clues in the places of his childhood in Brussels, where his mother had fled with him from the Nazi regime, before entire streets fell victim to urban renewal, he moved in a double sense in Atget's footsteps.
It can easily go wrong when a renowned photographer tries to reinvent himself at the age of eighty-three. But the alternation of the images between compositional rigor and an already shameful lightness makes the exhibition in the Marta Herford Museum with around two hundred black and white photos an experience. Some series hung in long rows, others arranged in picture blocks, the pictures constantly open up new insights into an artistic feeling, but also into an artist's biography. Because Katz, who was a painter, graphic artist and gallery owner, even an actor in his life before he finally dedicated himself to photography, shows with each of his life impressions at the same time one of his life stations - and overall the sum of his life experience and attitude.
It is an optimistic image that he conveys and with which he makes you forget that the real basic feeling of photography is melancholy.
But he encounters the quirks of life with a mischievous grin and moves the "Entree Libre" sign into the center of the series of pictures of a house being demolished in Dinard until the wrecking ball tears it apart.
Or he photographs a clochard on a bench in Paris by the Rambuteau metro station - directly under an advertising poster with the speech bubble: Don't let yourself roll away.
There is a warm sense of humor that is inherent in his recordings, like a wink, without any ridicule or even cynicism.
In doing so, he expands humanistic photography, which is otherwise so popular with the state, with a zest for life - and a smile.
Benjamin Katz - Entdeckungen, Discoveries, Découvertes,
Museum Marta Herford in Herford; until October 3rd. The catalog, published by Snoeck Verlag, costs € 39.80.