SCHÜRMANN, Wilhelm - Das nötig

Background information

"It was perhaps also a genuine alchemical interest that brought him to photography. The first photographic steps of Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN took him to the far west of Germany, where the self-taught photographer is still located today. The dreary villages of the Liège and Aachen hinterland form the motifs of his early black-and-white works.  To this day, they have remained counter-images in the classical sense, whose bleak 1970s charm is currently being rediscovered in the United States and also in Berlin. At that time, the uneventful pictorial poetry of a Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN had to pave its way through the still few cultural institutions to which photography was reserved. A first major platform was offered to him in 1977 by the Hanoverian gallery Spectrum, which showed him alongside Robert HÄUSSER, Werner MANTZ and Floris M. NEUSÜSS. Two years later, Klaus Honnef in Bonn ranked him among the country's most important auteur photographers for his exhibition project 'In Germany' and attested him 'a kind of road photography', which he pursued with a great deal of obstinacy. Years later, this obstinacy gave rise to some of the best volumes of photographs. In 1993, the photo volume 'Pegel Köln' appeared, a city volume that, in the style of CHARGESHEIMER, created a largely cliché-free image of the Rhine city, and three years earlier the excellent large-format photo volume 'das nötig' was published by the Belgian Edition Travers, a sensitive decade view of the 1980s. Even the strange title, which in Kurt Schwitters manner processed a text fragment of advertising, clearly indicated that Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN was probably no longer satisfied with the alchemy of photography. An end point had been reached, but in the experimental laboratory of pictures there were still quite other possibilities. I take photos and I take photos!" was Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN's blatant appropriation attack on the medium. In 1974, together with Rudolf Kicken, he opened the gallery 'Lichttropfen' in Aachen. At that time, photography was still an uncultivated field; it was a matter of digging up the fallow treasures like truffle pigs. For more than half a decade 'Kicken & Schürmann' did pioneering work and showed international greats like André GELPKE, Josef SUDEK, Jaromír FUNKE, Albert RENGER-PATZSCH and UMBO. As a gallery owner, Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN was clever enough to assemble a top-class collection of Czech photography of the 1920s and 1930s at the same time." (© Christoph Schaden)

Content

The out-of-print photo volume 'das nötig' by Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN contains black-and-white shots from German cities (including the Aachen, Düsseldorf and Liège areas, many from Cologne) , dreary everyday places. Also included are shots from the then important art scene (Kippenberger, Herold, Cindy SHERMAN).

About the German photographer, Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN (b.1946)

Photo books by Wilhelm SCHÜRMANN