Description
Caspar David Friedrich – Call of Solitude
2024 marks the 250th birthday of the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. The artist, who lived from 1774 to 1840, was one of the great sources of inspiration for my style of landscape photography right from the start. Studying oil paintings such as “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”, “Lonely Monk”, “Watzmann” or “Abbey in the Eichwald” had a lasting influence on my photography. In particular, the atmosphere of the paintings with fog, full moonlight or valleys filled with haze, but also the motifs such as old solitary trees, ruins or wild mountain landscapes can also be found in my photography. To create his pictures, Friedrich first went out into nature to make lifelike sketches. Over the years he created hundreds if not thousands of studies of trees, rocks and landscapes. In his studio he compiled various sketches, some even from different regions, to create the ideal landscapes for his oil paintings. For me, the work process is the other way around, because the preparation of my photos takes place at my desk so that after meticulous, often days-long consideration of light and weather conditions, I can then take a photo of the real landscape at the hopefully optimal time. But when it comes to the imagery, the preference for the light of twilight and the discovery of even the small motifs on the doorstep, we have a lot in common. This resulted in the book “The Call of Loneliness,” a photographic journey of longing through Germany in which photos are repeatedly juxtaposed with the artist’s paintings. The lecture expands the content of the book with further impressions and anecdotes from my tours in the footsteps of Caspar David Friedrich and invites you to rediscover Romanticism in the 21st century.
Type: Multivision show
Duration: 1h