From 16 May 2024, the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn will be showing the first major retrospective of the important photojournalist and author Dirk Reinartz (1947–2004). Twenty years after his untimely death, the focus is on his extensive oeuvre, which distinguishes him as an outstanding photographer of the late Federal Republic of Germany and the reunified Germany. Whether in his early foreign reportages, for example for Stern in Japan, or in his free photo series from the German provinces: Reinartz succeeds in capturing socio-political developments, cultural upheavals and concrete life situations of people in subtle photographic narratives through a precise and pointed visual language.
The central theme of Reinartz's work is the preoccupation with Germany and the Germans. Throughout his life, he was on the lookout for motifs in which a German identity is revealed, with all its contradictions and historical anchors: from small-town life in the example of Buxtehude to the great social reorientation after 1989. In publications such as "Kein schöner Land" (1989) or "Bismarck. On the Betrayal of the Monuments" (1991), Reinartz shed light on the German culture of remembrance and the persistence of the past in the present. In "totenstill" (1994), an examination of the architectural remains of National Socialist concentration camps, he asked how the horror could be depicted. Reinartz's work has appeared in many major magazines such as Der Spiegel, in the magazines of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the ZEIT, as well as in the art magazine art. The exhibition brings to mind Dirk Reinartz's oeuvre along those areas of tension that preoccupied him throughout his life, such as power and powerlessness, proximity and distance, history and the present.
16 May to 15 September 2024
https://landesmuseum-bonn.lvr.de
Untitled, New York, 1974. © Deutsche Fotothek+Stiftung F.C. Gundlach / Dirk Reinartz
