Margret. Chronik einer Affäre'

Background information

In the out of print photo volume 'Margret. Chronik einer Affäre. Mai 1969 bis Dezember 1970' (Margret. Chronicle of an Affair. May 1969 to December 1970), a Cologne businessman (Günter) keeps meticulous records of the affair with his employee Margret. The photos were found in a briefcase during an apartment clearance, ended up with a gallery owner, who passed them on to a colleague, Susanne Zander, an expert on so-called outsider art. Voyeuristic self-dramatizations are known from recent art history. The French artist Sophie CALLE, for example, commissioned a detective to shadow her. And in Istanbul, the writer Orhan Pamuk shows artifacts of a fictitious love in his 'Museum of Innocence'. Günther and Margret, however, really existed.

Content

In the photo book 'Margret. Chronik einer Affäre. Mai 1969 bis Dezember 1970' the bourgeois and the obscene are lined up seamlessly: photos before and after sex, in spa parks and in new clothes bought by him, nothing remains hidden. The viewer as voyeur is defencelessly at the mercy of it all: Mention is made of the 'redfish fillet with lamb's lettuce and nice potatoes' and 'supine position and the special position'.
The 'charm' of the estate prepared as a book lies in the emphatically sober and at the same time obsessive, authentic documentation of this passion. The pictures - first in black and white, later in color - also show the course of the affair and the changes in the way the two treated each other until the end of the affair in December 1970. At the same time, the collection of amateur photographs, notes, tickets and bills functions as a portrait of the late 1960s: it opens up a view of an era in which spa hotels were the big world, 'Capi with MM sparkling wine' was drunk and 'smoked a cigarette afterwards', in which business closed at 5 p.m. and people made themselves comfortable in front of 'color TV'. In 1970, the story of the prostitute Josefine Mutzenbacher was also made into a film, erotica went into the bookcases (and was only hidden when the relatives came to visit). From today's perspective, in times of social media and influencing, one is inclined to believe that everything was staged for later publication.