Eyes wide open! 100 years of Leica photography – that is the name of the anniversary exhibition celebrating 100 years of Leica photography that will be on view in the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt from 13 March to 31 May 2015. The anniversary exhibition is dedicated to the radical changes and visual revolution in the world of photography that were triggered by the appearance of the technically innovative, compact, light and extremely mobile ‘Leica’ (‘Leitz Camera’). The exhibition spotlights various aspects of 35 mm photography from its beginnings to the present day – from journalistic strategies and documentary approaches to examples of freestyle artistic imagery. The exhibition will be showing more than 200 photographs together with documentary material, camera models and publications from the company archives at Leica Camera AG.
The Fotografie Forum Frankfurt will be presenting works by prominent Leica photographers like Nobuyoshi Araki, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Bruno Barbey, René Burri, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, William Eggleston, Ralph Gibson, F. C. Gundlach, Elisabeth Hase, Fred Herzog, Barbara Klemm, Herbert List, Paula Luttringer, Susan Meiselas, Ulrich Mack, Joel Meyerowitz, Paolo Roversi, Jeanloup Sieff, Christer Strömholm, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paul Wolff and Tom Wood. These are joined by less familiar photographs captured by amateurs and artists whose names have never been associated with 35 mm photography until today – for instance, the socially critical painter George Grosz and the legendary art director Mehemed Fehmy Agha. Other focal points of the exhibition are the avant-garde school of the 1920s and 1930s, the subjectivism of the 1950s, the ‘Photographie Humaniste’ movement in post-war France, Spanish and Japanese photography, American ‘New Color Photography’ and examples of fashion and contemporary street photography.
The book to the exhibition, entitled Eyes wide open! 100 years of Leica photography, has been published by the Kehrer Verlag. This work, compiled and edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle, contains 1,200 photographs on 576 pages and will be available during the exhibition in the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt.
Eyes wide open! 100 years of Leica photography is a collaboration between the Deichtorhallen/Haus der Photographie Hamburg and the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt with the support of Leica Camera AG. Curated by Michael Koetzle (freelance writer, publicist and former editor-in-chief of Leica World), the exhibition celebrated its premiere in Hamburg in 2014, the anniversary year, and was very well attended. Conceived as a touring exhibition, the next stop on the calendar of Eyes wide open! 100 years of Leica photography will be the C/O Berlin from 22 August 2015. The exhibition will also be appearing at the Westlicht/Ostlicht gallery in Vienna from December 2015 to February 2016 and, from March to June 2016, in the Kunstfoyer of the Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich.