Boxes upon boxes. Up to the ceiling. Yellow, carefully labeled. Meters high. Albrecht Fuchs opens one, then another. Carefully. And hardly has he laid out the first pages of his many, many, many contact print folders before him on a table in his old apartment in Cologne, it begins. The head cinema. With real movie stars and false expectations. No, even an Isabelle Huppert is of course just a human. A particularly delicate-looking one, however. Standing very upright, very gracefully, on a hotel balcony in Ostend. Without an apparent pose, and yet controlled down to the smallest detail. "Her management actually left nothing to chance," says Albrecht Fuchs, and it almost sounds as if he had casually photographed the great Huppert at the edge of a film shoot. For the edition of "Le Monde M".
Anyone who knows the works of the Cologne photographer immediately sees their uniqueness: Nothing in these images seems staged. Not even with an Isabelle Huppert. That is precisely her great charm: "Frankfurter Rundschau" once called Fuchs a "favorite of the artists." Because the images from the Cologne native thrive on naturalness and privacy, almost intimacy. How does he manage that? Fuchs waves it off: "Actually, it’s more of an intuitive process," he says modestly. During a portrait session, he is in constant conversation with the artists and tries to photograph a portrait instead of a self-portrait. Because these special people certainly master staging very well. So the question is: What’s behind it?
Of course, Albrecht Fuchs knows some artists very well: He has been closely friends with Johannes Wohnseifer for decades, for example. Or with Laurenz Berges, who today stands for a piece of photography history himself. Both studied together at the Folkwang University of the Arts in the mid-80s. When Berges got an internship with the German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer in New York in 1889, Fuchs followed him there for half a year. And he gained insight into the scene at that time: "I learned to appreciate the works of Evelyn Hofer, this classically composed portrait photography, very much back then," says Fuchs, who was born in 1964 in Bielefeld, and it almost sounds as if his now-typical visual language also emerged rather incidentally: "The parameters of how I take the pictures have actually not changed for 30 years." Fuchs photographs in color, with a tripod, exclusively with available light, almost only digitally today, but until ten years ago primarily with an analog medium format camera.
In New York, he begins to portray friends, his then-girlfriend, now wife – a native American who moves to Cologne with him and starts a family. From his surroundings, he approaches artists like Jürgen Klauke, who has just taken a teaching position in Essen in the early 90s. In 1993, he meets composer Ennio Morricone in Rome. In an apartment that is almost palace-like, it quickly becomes clear what makes Fuchs' photography so special: He always thinks about the surrounding space in his shots. He shows the immensely wealthy music giant in an apartment full of opulent carpets, cushions, and decor. In one photo, Georg Herold poses by a pool during an artist residency in Los Angeles. Like a monument to self-confidence, as if he owns all of Hollywood. In 1995, he creates a series that ultimately makes Fuchs famous: He meets Martin Kippenberger in the Chelsea Hotel in Cologne, who directly guides him into his hotel room, dealing with jetlag and a hangover – to simply lie down on the sofa and in bed in front of the still unfamiliar photographer, feeling burned out and tired.
During the lockdown, a series about artists emerges – with the support of the "Auf geht’s!" scholarship from the state of NRW: Fuchs photographs, among others, Julia Scher, who appears not only detached from daily business but also from society behind a mask and an additional visor. How isolated. Many photos are commissioned works – and family portraits, so to speak, are another specialty: At the invitation of the Böhm family, he travels from the bustling Belgian Quarter in Cologne, where he lives, to the fashionable Marienburg. The center of the image and thus the family is quickly identified: Gottfried Böhm. However, he is not only flanked by Böhm's wife and their joint sons but also by the bronze bust of his father. A multi-generational portrait.
That his exhibition at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren is now called “Album” seems only consistent: Albrecht Fuchs' setlist is actually constantly being extended. All of his photos have their own sound. Sometimes they are stronger, sometimes more subdued – a striking interplay between closeness. And distance. His most difficult subject? Albrecht Fuchs thinks. Joschka Fischer was probably the most urgent one. In 1998, he photographed the then top politician for the SZ Magazine during a training run. Fischer doesn’t give himself a break – certainly not for the photographer. After just a few minutes, the driven man has already disappeared again. And the intensity, the tension of the brief encounter is captured on photographic material.
