Review by Peter Bialobrzeski
borders of documentary
The first photograph that I saw by Andreas Weinand, which must have been fifteen years ago now, depicted depraved-looking young people at some sort of heavy metal party. It had been taken on a Christmas Eve in the late 1980s. I remember thinking then that the photographer must be some kind of tough guy. The photographs struck me as unbelievably harsh, full of an archaic power. They were, in the best sense of the word, atmospheric – instantly transporting me to a environment I wished to have nothing to do with. In another photograph from the same series, two young men stand on their hands in the pounding surf of a beach in Portugal. This picture had an equal force, an equal intensity, and the young pair portrayed here, I learned later, belonged to the same group of adolescents.
Andreas Weinand entitled this series, his early 1990s graduation project at the University in Essen, Finding Oneself. The title indicates that this series means much more to Andreas than merely a reportage on a youthful gang. It is representative of a stance in the world of photography rare back then and nearly absent now. Andreas Weinand was striving to expand the genre of the photo-reportage, in order to arrive at a universal statement defining youth and the search for onself. Even though he was close to his protagonists, he was not afraid to trespass boundaries, and did not shirk from taking photographs that were intimate, at the same time using the camera as a dissecting scalpel. In doing so, he left the traditional [and at that point the only acceptable] black and white form of reportage far behind him. At the same time he made it clear that while the esssayistic devices used by Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson during the 1960s and 1970s in their monumental books, The Bikeriders, and Brooklyn Gang were stylistically adequate for capturing that particular epoch, they were nevertheless not suitable for mediating the youth culture of the 1980s.
Andreas Weinand therefore decided to use a medium format camera, and often employed a flash in daylight, he thus achieved almost surreal frozen moments; a highly topical translation of the fragmentary peaks of the adolescent state of mind. Andreas Weinand’s photographs thematize yet another feature typical of the 1980s: sensitivity and hardness, the seeming ambivalence that wound through the mental landscape of the youth culture of the late West Germany, torn between the necessity of social protest against nuclear energy and the NATO armaments race, and the desire for private happiness.
In terms of the photographic tradition, Weinand’s work of the 1980s and early 1990s place him in the context of the „New Color Photography“ of the USA. Other influences from this period would be, for instance, the work of Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank.
After finishing his studies, Andreas Weinand made his living through commissions from magazines such as Tempo and Stem. Among his themes are, naturally, „Youth“ and „German Festivals“. Nonethless he quickly realized that his own motivation to work in the field of photography, and the way in which the media use his photographs, are radically different. The media did not present Weinand’s readiness and I sensitivity in terms of commitment to his themes, but instead took his radical interpretation of the image to be a signifier of a tacit agreement, of a cynical distance from the world.
Disappointed, Weinand withdrew, and embarked on his work, Reflecting Oneself, in which he attempted to define himself and his relationship to the world in diary-like, tranquil and yet extremely precise photographs. In terms of visual language, he thus removed himself from his earlier work, while maintaining his integrity at the level of content. Let us quote Andreas Weinand on this point: „My interest in photography
derives from the need to express myself and to explore the essential questions of life. At the center of my work is a search for human identity.“
His current work, Field, a long-term observation of two small farmers in the Ruhr, on the surface again appears totally different from his previous work. But if we look more closely, it definitely forms an integral part of his canon. Through his photography, he explores whether certain social propositions, outside of social conventions, could play an important role for him. The radicalism of youth revolt has given way to a subtle, almost polite cultivation of the land with hard physical labor, and this is just as sincere as it is of consequence to an artist now over forty years old. To have the same sensibility as a twenty-five year old does not mean, in Weinand’s world, to remain an unemployed and disaffected youth. This makes him pleasantly different from many of his „creative“ contemporaries, who in their Doc Marten shoes, baseball caps and hooded sweatshirts vainly try to conserve their past dreams. Field is thus far less conservative than the attempts of greying techno DJs to create, in runnning a club of their own, a Walhalla of the previous era. Field tries to describe the possibilities of a self-sufficient, simple life within an ever more complex society. An attempt rather similar to those of Knut Hamsun and Ernst Wiechert in the literature of the early 20th century.
With his earnest, meticulous subjective-documentary manner, Andreas Weinand in my opinion ranks among the most seminal photographers of his generation. It is regrettable that none of his works have been published yet in book form, or even presented in a solo exhibition. In a world where culture has to ever more loudly draw attention to itself to be noticed at all in the clamor of the mass media, such placid and non-spectacular projects have a difficult time. Andreas Weinand and his work remind me a little of the British photographer Tom Wood. For fifteen years, Wood worked in and around Liverpool on everyday projects, almost unnoticed. It was not until the Cologne gallery owner Thomas Zander discovered Wood and was able to foist him onto the museum circuit that Wood’s work won the recognition it deserved. Within a few years, several books of his work were published, while his photographs were displayed in respected museums and became part of renowned collections. The work of Andreas Weinand has a similar potential, and it is worthy of attention. I wish him luck.
Published in FOTOGRAF #05 / borders of documentary // 2005