Achim Katzberg

Allemagne

La passion d'Achim Katzberg pour la photographie s’est révélée dans son enfance... parce qu'il avait eu dès son plus jeune âge une caméra avec cassettes. Mais tout a vraiment commencé quand, grâce à l'argent de sa confirmation, un appareil photo reflex est tombé entre ses mains. Depuis lors, cette passion ne s'est jamais vraiment arrêtée. Bien qu'il ait tout d'abord pris un chemin différent sur le plan professionnel, depuis 2010, la photographie est devenue un second emploi en parallèle de son travail dans une banque allemande renommée. Achim est un autodidacte : de bons contacts, quelques formations pour lui permettre d’enrichir sa pratique, et bien sûr son regard sur de nombreux ouvrages qui sont ses références : Elliot Erwitt (qui est même imité avec sa célèbre série sur les chiens), André Kertesz, Vivian Maier ... mais aussi des confrères comme Siegfried Hansen, qui quelques années auparavant avait édité un livre avec Wolfgang Zurborn, comme Achim Katzberg l'a fait cette année-là.

En plus de son travail en tant que « freelance » dans la photographie de rue, son univers s’ouvre également à d’autres styles photographiques comme l’architecture, la photographie de voyage, les portraits d'entreprises et les reportages d'événements. Malgré cette diversité, il n’en reste pas moins un fil conducteur : Achim Katzberg compose ses motifs de manière très précise dans ses formats d'image. La division des zones et des lignes est extrêmement stricte. Ses photos sont souvent des scènes ... en partie avec - en partie sans personnes. Outre son travail de reportage, on pourrait dire qu'il est un artiste « graphique » parmi les photographes. Mais vous en saurez plus à son sujet dans la documentation du livre "Big City Life".

Galerie

His Project: ›Big City Life‹

The dream of flying is something deeply rooted for mankind - and for photographers there is the eternal dream of their own book. This seems to be genetically determined. Although both are now attainable; it's just not as easy as riding a bicycle and writing letters. Even if the photo book producers want us to believe that 1-2-3 can create a book. One should not be blinded by the supposedly professional appearance: The art is still in the planning, in the choice of the sequence of pictures, the narrative combination of two pictures on a double page. And then there are the graphic details: layout and typography. So books are to a large extent about inner values.

At the beginning of his book idea, Achim Katzberg had in mind a review of his free works of the past years. He collected hundreds of pictures from his archive and discussed his project with colleagues. Like Wolfgang Zurborn from Cologne, for example, who has a lot of experience in editing books. By sharing his pictures and his project with others, the author of the pictures already changed his point of view. The idea of a retrospective would only have been interesting for the small group of connoisseurs of Achim Katzberg's work. But that's usually too short a thought for books. The photographer began distilling his selection in such a way that a concentrated selection uncovered a core, thus giving the book a universal theme: The city as an ultra-modern stage setting, man as an isolated being. This theme can certainly be seen as a look at an attitude to life. The protagonists in the hustle and bustle of urban geometry appear like fugitives and peripheral phenomena in a space hostile to life. In the highly aestheticized environment of banking districts, harbor cities, and overdesigned museum quarters, which surround us as a representation of modern life, people appear like a memory of an architect's dream: Look here ... it was created for you. But these supposed inhabitants seem to long for somewhere else and are at least in their thoughts somewhere else. Because they do not belong here. They are sorry to disturb ... 'we hurry to leave the picture so as not to destroy the perfection'. The places do not connect with the people and the people do not connect with the places.

But the photographer has waited patiently for exactly this disrupter to appear? _ that's how the picture should be. In the end, is it also his own attitude towards life? As with most good films (... and artist's books), we are naturally deprived of a happy end and questions remain open. But besides an admiration for beauty, there is a deep malaise slumbering there. And even the smart uniformed 'Maintenance Manager' in the last picture leaves the stage resigned with shovel and dustpan and has no desire to remove the invisible traces of human life ...