At first glance, theater and photography couldn't be more different.

One makes time flow, the other makes it stop.

One is perishable, the other is permanent.

If you wanted to try to reconstruct an evening at the theater from individual photos, you would experience the coroner: the body would be complete, but the life in it would be extinguished.

No picture would bring back the energy of the scene.

And no gesture, no prop, the inner movement of the drama.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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Nevertheless, the art of the stage and that of the camera have come together.

Photography was always bound to its task of documenting what was happening in the theater, be it for advertising posters or as a newspaper illustration.

The theater photographer was a reporter, not a reviewer.

But even the first better representatives of the profession created their own style.

A stage photo by Ludwig Gutmann looks different than one by Ursula Richter.

Abisag Tüllmann's trained eye for drawing also shows through in her theatrical images.

It took some time, more than a century, for photography historians to understand this type of art observation as an art form in its own right.

But now the time has come.

The exhibition is a spectacle in itself

At the entrance to the exhibition by photographer Ruth Walz in the Berlin Museum of Photography, you can see that a special form of picture making is being celebrated here. The door is a curtain, the narrow sides of the museum hall are decorated with wall-high portraits of actors and views of individual performances. The exhibits are not arranged in chronological order, but rather according to topics and key words. The exhibition itself is a staging of its holdings, a spectacle of photographic art. On this picture stage, the theater appears in its prime.

Ruth Walz is twenty-six, a single mother and student at the Berliner Lette-Verein, when she took her first theater photo during a guest appearance by Giorgio Strehler. Nine years later, in 1976, she became a permanent photographer at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. The oldest recordings in the exhibition show views of Klaus Michael Grüber's Hölderlin project in the Olympic Stadium. You can feel the cold and emptiness of the huge dark room and the ecstatic atmosphere that reigns in it. And the camera is everywhere, in the stands, among the actors on the lawn and in front of the bowl with the Olympic flame. Ruth Walz's stamina is legendary in the industry. After rehearsals and premieres, she retired to the laboratory while the actors went to the pub and developed her pictures until dawn.Even today, at eighty, she still photographs three or four-hour opera productions standing up without getting tired.

Unlike many previous and current colleagues, she consistently adopts the viewer's perspective. In its wild years, the Schaubühne wanted to tear down the invisible wall between theater and audience. The impulse expired with the move to Lehniner Platz, but with Ruth Walz it became a photographic attitude. One of her iconic recordings was made in 1978. It shows the stage set by Karl-Ernst Herrmann for Botho Strauss' "Trilogy of Reunion". The setting is a living room that is populated by twelve people in different poses. In order to capture what is happening as a whole, the photographer has positioned herself in the upper part of the parquet. By bringing the audience's heads to the fore, it creates perspective distance and aesthetic closeness at the same time. The theater and those to whom it speakscome in a picture.