A time photographed
Jupp Darchinger: the Fifties and early Sixties. By Klaus Honnef. Excerpt from the book 'Wirtschaftswunder'
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The eye the photographer cast on things in the Fifties and Sixties is that of a meticulous and scrupulous contemporary observer, dispassionate and unequivocal. Focusing on the crucial point, loath to play formal games. The aim was to convey with visual impact what he had seen. His concern for objectivity in no way meant foregoing a personal standpoint. The photographer's interest in social injustice is unmistakable. He gave destitution a visible face with stark immediacy, as he found it in the lamentable conditions of the countless refugee camps. Emergency shelters they were called. Not to gloss over the wretchedness but to emphasize their provisional nature. They were cleared in the mid-Sixties.With palpable commitment, Darchinger made a central theme of the lot of the pensioners with too little to live and too much to die, the disabled ex-servicemen, who at first benefited little or not at all from the economic miracle, and those who just a few years earlier had been the victims of political persecution. The social divide opened wide at an early stage, and the road was paved to the "two-thirds society". Occasionally, too, a hidden vein of romanticism shines through in his pictures, for instance in his shot of a tug in the Rheingau belching out steam against the golden glow of the sky, and there is throughout a sense of mild astonishment in the face of the things he recorded.
"In Search of Lost Time"
The astonishment is perhaps the most striking feature in Darchinger's photographs. Clearly, he looked at his own country with the eyes of a stranger, as Andy Warhol later looked at the USA. Not so far removed from the perceptions of people sixty or seventy years younger, only in the opposite direction. Because Darchinger's formative experiences had been gathered in the Nazi period and in a murderous war followed by captivity. A totally different world. Accordingly, what the photographer saw and recorded with his camera was virgin land for him, and with the eye of the stranger in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", contemplating his grandmother after a long absence, he registered the transformation that was taking place, the changes that were catapulting the larger part of Germany politically and culturally out of the center of Europe and into the West. If the French writer's observer saw only the signs of decay, Darchinger in contrast saw the signs of a new awakening. At the same time, he made manifest, consciously and unconsciously, the obvious and the latent contradictions and conflicts. The eye gets "sharper and sharper when the surroundings are unfamiliar", affirmed the film director Doris Dörrie. Darchinger has kept this sharp eye. Distance, the photographer says, is essential in his profession.
It is, furthermore, the eye of a largely "sceptical generation", as sociologist Helmut Schelsky has called them. Darchinger's pictures are literally steeped in a mood of confidence, of a new start, of the will to live. Even when the outward circumstances were deplorable, as in the hut camps on the periphery of most cities or in the roughly patched-up, bomb-damaged houses. A total of twelve million refugees had streamed across to the west from the former eastern territories of Germany and the Soviet zone, the later GDR, and had to be integrated, although there was a huge housing shortage, particularly in the west of the country. And if the locals, who were also suffering from the scarcity of housing, occasionally berated them as "Polacks", it is still perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the federal German republic and its society that the integration of the refugees was accomplished relatively smoothly. The economic upturn in the wake of the Korean War, which fuelled a huge boom in exports, benefited the process, and the hard work and skills of the expellees lent it the necessary thrust.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The eye the photographer cast on things in the Fifties and Sixties is that of a meticulous and scrupulous contemporary observer, dispassionate and unequivocal. Focusing on the crucial point, loath to play formal games. The aim was to convey with visual impact what he had seen. His concern for objectivity in no way meant foregoing a personal standpoint. The photographer's interest in social injustice is unmistakable. He gave destitution a visible face with stark immediacy, as he found it in the lamentable conditions of the countless refugee camps. Emergency shelters they were called. Not to gloss over the wretchedness but to emphasize their provisional nature. They were cleared in the mid-Sixties.With palpable commitment, Darchinger made a central theme of the lot of the pensioners with too little to live and too much to die, the disabled ex-servicemen, who at first benefited little or not at all from the economic miracle, and those who just a few years earlier had been the victims of political persecution. The social divide opened wide at an early stage, and the road was paved to the "two-thirds society". Occasionally, too, a hidden vein of romanticism shines through in his pictures, for instance in his shot of a tug in the Rheingau belching out steam against the golden glow of the sky, and there is throughout a sense of mild astonishment in the face of the things he recorded.
"In Search of Lost Time"
The astonishment is perhaps the most striking feature in Darchinger's photographs. Clearly, he looked at his own country with the eyes of a stranger, as Andy Warhol later looked at the USA. Not so far removed from the perceptions of people sixty or seventy years younger, only in the opposite direction. Because Darchinger's formative experiences had been gathered in the Nazi period and in a murderous war followed by captivity. A totally different world. Accordingly, what the photographer saw and recorded with his camera was virgin land for him, and with the eye of the stranger in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", contemplating his grandmother after a long absence, he registered the transformation that was taking place, the changes that were catapulting the larger part of Germany politically and culturally out of the center of Europe and into the West. If the French writer's observer saw only the signs of decay, Darchinger in contrast saw the signs of a new awakening. At the same time, he made manifest, consciously and unconsciously, the obvious and the latent contradictions and conflicts. The eye gets "sharper and sharper when the surroundings are unfamiliar", affirmed the film director Doris Dörrie. Darchinger has kept this sharp eye. Distance, the photographer says, is essential in his profession.
It is, furthermore, the eye of a largely "sceptical generation", as sociologist Helmut Schelsky has called them. Darchinger's pictures are literally steeped in a mood of confidence, of a new start, of the will to live. Even when the outward circumstances were deplorable, as in the hut camps on the periphery of most cities or in the roughly patched-up, bomb-damaged houses. A total of twelve million refugees had streamed across to the west from the former eastern territories of Germany and the Soviet zone, the later GDR, and had to be integrated, although there was a huge housing shortage, particularly in the west of the country. And if the locals, who were also suffering from the scarcity of housing, occasionally berated them as "Polacks", it is still perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the federal German republic and its society that the integration of the refugees was accomplished relatively smoothly. The economic upturn in the wake of the Korean War, which fuelled a huge boom in exports, benefited the process, and the hard work and skills of the expellees lent it the necessary thrust.
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Josef Heinrich Darchinger, Wirtschaftswunder
Hardcover, slipcase, 39.6 x 33 cm (15.6 x 13 in.), 290 pages
$ 600.00
$ 600.00
Rare color photographs of the German "economic miracle." Limited to 1,000 copies, each numbered and signed by J. H. Darchinger and containing the signed color photograph Reichstag, Berlin, 1958
Children on a bomb site in Cologne. There are still people living in the less damaged parts of the house.
Photo (c) Josef Heinrich Darchinger, 1956
A home-made set of shelves in the garage under the house - and there's your shop. The eggs are always fresh from the country. They cost 20 pfennigs, scarcely any less than forty years later. Bonn 1955.
Photo (c) Josef Darchinger