BERNHARD HARTMANN
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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".
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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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Themes
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS
Library Stuttgart
After his series dedicated to the representation of the most famous operas in Germany, Bernhard Hartmann chose to photograph the municipal library of Stuttgart inaugurated in 2011. The resolutely contemporary building was the creation of the German-Korean architectural cabinet Eun Young Yi. A monolithic cube on the outside, the interior spaces are stacked on top of large galleries, based on a square floor plan. Both conceptual and functional, the interior space is completely white, and only the spines of books add colour. The simple, direct and radiant architecture contributes to its identity as a public library, open to all, and distances it from the model of the elitist institute. With a perfectly frontal shot, Bernhard Hartmann chose to emphasise the symmetry of the building. The photographer was able to appropriate the space, empty of all human presence and thus endowed with a timeless character. He insists on the solemnity of the site, and stresses the symbol that the library represents as both a spiritual site and the seat of knowledge. ... See more See less
