ALBRECHT TÜBKE MY FIRST EXP...
Albrecht TübkeMy first experience of Albrecht Tübke's exacting photographic sensibility, and the quietude of his images, was seeing his Dalliendorf series. Dalliendorf is a small village in the north east of Germany where Albrecht Tubke came to live with his family when he was ten years old. When he re-visited Dalliendorf as an adult while studying photography at Leipzig University in the mid 1990s, the landscape, homes and people of the village seemed to him to have undergone only minor changes since his childhood. Returning to Dalliendorf created emotions in him that combined his present with his remembered relationship with this place. Aged 26, Tubke began making photographs in the village as a way of marking his dual experience - both remembered and current - of Dalliendorf. There is a level of detachment in the way in which Tubke chose to present the village and, in particular, the portrayal of the villagers. This approach acknowledges his position as a photographer stepping back into Dalliendorf. But what also emerged, for Tubke, was the realisation that this level of detachment had always been part of his relationship with this place.
Albrecht Tubke's acute sensitivity to the fragile but recordable relationships that are struck between photographers and their subjects is born out in the series Citizens with a different emphasis than his earlier work. Similarly to Dalliendorf, the sites for the photographs, the backdrops to his portraits, are considered in advance. But unlike Dalliendorf, his subjects are strangers that walked close to him in the cities he visited, rather than his neighbours, who triggered in Tubke a curiosity and sense of photographic potential. Tubke is fascinated in the detail of the promenader, their stance when being photographed, the nature of their visual display, the subtle codes of character and artifice that we decipher and project upon. Each of his citizens seems to offer a reflective pause onto complex stories of good and bad luck, of epic and mundane journeys through life.
This same visual fascination comes into play with Celebration, Tubke's most recent work. This series of forty portraits - some single images, others displayed in diptych form - were taken at public festivals in Europe. Some of the festival goers are elaborately bedecked in costumes with only their eyes and hands partly visible within their masquerade. Others have more reticently added (but are no less transformative) small accessorising details to their dress in acknowledgement of the public events that they attend. All of Celebration's subjects are presented with an ambiguity, a sense of the fragility of these temporary reinventions at festival times. A soft, plastic face mask is juxtaposed in one diptych with the putty-like face of a middle aged man, the primary colouration of costumes for demons, superheroes and vampires is flattened to a code when pulled out of the processional flow of the festivals. Children especially are shown clutching bags of confetti and paint spray cans - signs of the acts of their masquerade, suspended while their photograph is taken. Tubke does not specify the festivals or their locations in Celebration. The sense of the atmosphere and the different cultural approaches to public gatherings is played out on a more subtle level, in the spirit in which the temporary relationship between the photographer and his subjects is realised. In some of the images, there is a generosity in the stance of the sitters, maintaining something of their carnival performance in the moment of the photograph. In others, a tension and resistance to being scrutinised by the photographer for the idiosyncrasies of their masquerades, outside of the anonymity of the crowd.
Albrecht Tubke creates startlingly sensitive and revealing contemporary street photography. Whether of subjects he know intimately, or simply intuits photographically, these a intriguing photographs not obviously in the service of ego, commerce or sociology. From Tubke's quietude comes photography that does not propose an authoritative or critical stance, but in the process, his photographs are powerful none-the-less. His outstanding work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Charlotte Cotton, Curator of Photographs, Victoria & Albert Museum, London