BERNHARD HARTMANN

The narrator of silent stories

I love what is beautiful. The serenity of a beautiful garden and the grave of an architectural monument must provoke the same emotion for the viewer. They must be enchanted through their emotions.

BERNHARD HARTMANN

Born in Frankfurt in 1955, Bernhard Hartmann began his artistic career at the age of 18 as a press photographer for a German newspaper. Self-taught, he studied art and became a landscape photographer after discovering this medium with the aid of his parents' Polaroid. He creates dramatic and cinemascopic images that are often compared to the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, but also to the dramatic natural scenes by English painter William Turner. He prefers to photograph places where the arts are practised and expressed and thus presents series on operas, theatres, or European manors. A lawyer in Munich, Bernard Hartmann now lives near Lake Starnberg in the Bavarian Alps. His works belong to numerous private collections and have been shown in the United States, Spain, Italy, and Germany. He was elected "Photographer of the Year" by a Swiss magazine and won the "American Black and White Photo Awards" as well as the "Panoramic Epson Award". ... See more See less

Interview

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One sentence to describe your camera?

My camera represents a fascinating tool for seeing the world in a different way, far from the everyday routine. I can create a world full of miracles, a world full of beauty, and, in a more technical way, I can create what painters are capable of doing with their brushes and palette.

Where does your inspiration come from?

My inspiration is stimulated by paintings, photographs, and films, and of course, by music.

Why represent deserted landscapes?

In my imagination, opera houses, book stores, or classic monuments emptied of human presence show what we admire these days about this architecture with greater intensity.

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