Perhaps Taryn Simon did not want to be photographed at all, in any case she gave Albrecht Fuchs very little time for his portrait and let him come to a laboratory where she was busy producing her own photographs.

There she stood behind a large table, her hands on the plate, and stared straight into the camera.

It is not a great self-presentation, although one can assume that Taryn Simon was well aware of her expression and did not assume the pose of the Savior by da Vinci by chance.

Your robe does the rest.

And the fact that she had painted one of her thumbnails white underpins the desire for purity.

Freddy Langer

Editor in the features section, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".

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What suits your work. Because Taryn Simon deals with secret places, with the staging of power and even, in a figurative sense, with the resurrection of people, namely convicts who were wrongly sentenced to death. What she could not have suspected was the sure feeling with which Albrecht Fuchs would compose the surrounding, how he locked her between surfaces and lines, like borrowed from a constructivist drawing, but placed her head in front of the only black field, which was the glow of her skin still reinforced. In this way he succeeded no less than a modern image of a saint. That was in 2007.

Even at the beginning of the invention of photography, the portrait was one of the most popular genres of the medium, because suddenly everyone could take a picture of themselves home for little money and the portrait was no longer the privilege of the better-off. At the same time, it was one of the most complicated, because the long exposure time initially made it necessary to literally clamp people in screw clamps to prevent even the slightest movement of head or body. If you look at the portraits of Albrecht Fuchs, which currently fill three halls of the Leopold Hoesch Museum in large numbers, you might think that the photographer resorted to similar means.

Men lie on sofas, women lean against walls, people seem screwed to their armchairs. Nothing here has arisen from movement and little has been left to chance. The fact that all of these people are visual artists did not necessarily make it easy for Fuchs. Properties such as vanity and skepticism as well as a certain idea of ​​how pictures should look in general and of them in particular are a little more common among artists than among other people. This is one of the reasons why the artist portrait has always been in its own category. It wants to characterize and decipher the artist at the same time. Wants to get to the bottom of a secret and balance whether connections can be made between the exterior and the work, asks how creativity or even genius can be expressed in facial expressions,Reflect gestures and appearance.

Albrecht Fuchs has been photographing artists for more than thirty years - partly for himself, partly on behalf of magazines, publishers or galleries - and has dealt with a work in the hundreds and with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, Jeff Wall and Stephen Shore, Isa Genzken and Marcel Odenbach added to a who's who of contemporary art, and created his own place in photographic art. His style or, better still, his approach is characterized by foregoing effort. His only request to the portrayed seems to hold still. And look carefully into the camera. Preferably unemotional. This creates contact without becoming companionable. Of course, just setting up the medium format camera on the tripod ensures respect - and prevents spontaneity.Incidentally, Fuchs refrains from gags, elaborate productions and any hint of transfiguration or glamor. The matter is too serious for him.

Does he nevertheless lift the artists out of society in his pictures, does he clarify their special existence, their outsiderhood, beyond the individual - a certain remoteness, if you will? Yes and no. Because it goes without saying that he has more to do than the mere image of the physiognomy. But a psychological element is more palpable than tangible when Albrecht Fuchs keeps his distance without going at a distance. Most of the time he renounces the private environment, he almost never integrates the work of the artist, but even where he exposes people to the depths of a room, his greatest interest is the gaze. Every time you think you recognize a moment of brooding, of reflection, just like that,as if the portrayed had their artistic engagement with aspects of life and the world as well as the problems of their portrayal engraved deeply in their physiognomy. There is such seriousness on all the faces that this message in particular shimmers through the work of Albrecht Fuchs: Art is not fun.

Albrecht Fuchs: Portraits 1989-2021

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Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren;

until November 21.

The catalog was published by Verlag der Buchhandlung König and costs 28 euros.