Albrecht FuchsMK 95

Kippenberger – published in spring 2008, Albrecht Fuchs’s selection of photographic works “Portraits” has been nominated for the “Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008” (hosted by the renowned Photographers’ Gallery, London). The press had already responded euphorically to the appearance of the book with extensive picture spreads (in Welt and Frankfurter Rundschau, for example) and declared the Cologne photographer the “darling of the artists.” That this is no exaggeration is shown by the small series of photographs, at once formative and seminal, that Albrecht Fuchs took of Martin Kippenberger in the course of 1995. He accompanied him to Dawson City, to the studio and to the Black Forest, and in doing so experienced what he himself calls “his apprenticeship as a photographer.” This extraordinary phenomenon Kippenberger, photographed constantly and everywhere, good for many outstanding pictorial ideas, spontaneous and witty as some mistakenly believe, in fact knew the effect of his image precisely and calculated it in order to coax from the photographers the greatest possible fidelity to his idea. This was not posing, and to the degree that Albrecht Fuchs became enthusiastic about this process, he arrived at his independent and sensitive style of portraiture.