F. C. Gundlach

Franz Christian Gundlach (16 July 1926 – 23 July 2021) was a German photographer, gallery owner, collector, curator and founder.

F. C. Gundlach attended the Private Lehranstalt für Moderne Lichtbildkunst (Private School for Modern Photography) under Rolf W. Nehrdich in Kassel from 1946 to 1949.

Subsequently, he began publishing theatre and film reports in magazines such as Deutsche Illustrierte, Stern, Quick and Revue as a freelance photographer.

Gundlach's fashion photographs of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, often integrating social phenomena and visual arts trends, are now found in museums and collections.

Gundlach's specialization in fashion photography began in 1953 with his work for the Hamburg-based magazine Film und Frau, for which he photographed German fashion, Parisian haute couture and fur fashion campaigns.

Additionally he photographed Romy Schneider, Hildegard Knef, Dieter Borsche and Jean-Luc Godard.

For Film und Frau, but also for Stern, Annabelle, Twen and other magazines, Gundlach made fashion and reportage trips to the Near, Middle and Far East as well as to Central and South America.

Under an exclusive contract with Brigitte, he photographed more than 160 covers and 5,000 pages of editorial fashion.

Gundlach founded CC (Creative Color GmbH) in 1967 and soon afterwards the photographic service company PPS.

(Professional Photo Service) with black and white and colour laboratories, equipment shop, rental studios and a specialist bookshop.

Gundlach also organized exhibitions from his own collections including A Clear Vision, The Heartbeat of Fashion and Maloney, Meyerowitz, Shore, Sternfeld: New Color Photography of the 1970s. He curated the exhibitions More Than Fashion for the Moscow House of Photography, and Vanity for the Kunsthalle Wien in 2011.

In the 1970s and 1980s he worked in South America, Africa, New York and on the American west coas t.

Since 1975 he has curated many photographic exhibitions.

In 1975 he expanded the company to include the PPS.

Galerie F.C. Gundlach, one of the first pure photo galleries in Germany.

In the PPS.

Gallery, Gundlach presented more than 100 exhibitions from 1975 to 1992.

The artists included Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Joel-Peter Witkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Since the early 1980s, his attention focused on his collection of photographic works and the conception of photographic exhibitions.

Gundlach's retrospective solo exhibitions, such as ModeWelten (1985), Die Pose als Körpersprache (1999), Bilder machen Mode (2004) or ''F. C. Gundlach.

After many years as a lecturer, Gundlach was appointed professor at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin in 1988.

Many of these exhibitions consisted completely or in parts of his collection, e.g. Das Medium Fotografie ist berechtigt, Denkanstöße zu geben at the Hamburger Kunstverein 1989, Berlin en Vogue at the Berlinische Galerie 1993, Modebilder, Bildermode / Zeitgeist becomes Form for the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Ifa) 1995, Emotions & Relations at the Kunsthalle Hamburg 1998, Wohin kein Auge reicht at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg 1999 and Mode – Körper – Mode at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg 2000.

As a lobbyist for photography he initiated the Triennial of Photography in Hamburg in 1999.

In 2000 Gundlach created the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, and since 2003 he has been founding director of the House of Photography at Deichtorhallen, in Hamburg.

To create a safe haven for his life's work and his extensive photo collection and to enable the active work with his entire photographic legacy, he created the F. C. Gundlach Foundation in 2000.

Its purpose is the promotion of art, science and research in the field of photography, in particular the promotion of photography as a cultural asset.

Since September 2003 F. C. Gundlach was founding director of the House of Photography – Deichtorhallen Hamburg, where he installed his collection The Image of Man in Photography as a permanent loan.

The image of man has been topic in photography from the very beginning.

The F. C. Gundlach collection attaches special importance to those photographic works that open up new perspectives on human dignity and vulnerability beyond their historical status as visual documents.

Photography testifies to the ever-changing visual representation of mankind.

A focal point of the collection are therefore photographs that reflect the image of man in his external appearance – in fashions, poses, facial expressions and gestures.

Works of visual artists using photography are of special interest, accentuating the dialogical character of the medium.

Source:

On the reopening of the House of Photography in April 2005, Gundlach curated a retrospective of Martin Munkácsi.

The photographic work'' (2008) were shown in museums and galleries in Germany and abroad.

"He is a photographer whose images show the knowledge of the dominant role of fashion as a cultural social factor. For this reason, he rarely presented the phenomena of fashion in isolation, but rather linked them to the phenomenology of everyday reality and placed them in the socio-cultural context from which they ultimately originated. F. C. Gundlach proves to be a photographic artist with a will to style, a mastery of staging and the ability to shape the photographic image at his leisure, who arranges his models in ever new formal constellations: as a photographer of extraordinary aesthetic quality."

- Klaus Honnef

"As a fashion photographer who makes use of a recording medium, the photographer must live, think and feel entirely in his time. Fashion photographs are always interpretations and stagings. They reflect and visualize the zeitgeist of the present and anticipate the spirit of tomorrow. They offer projection screens for identification, but also for dreams, wishes and desires. And yet fashion photographs say more about a time than documentary photographs pretending to depict reality."

- F.C. Gundlach