KELLER, Dieter - The Eye of War. Ukraine 1941/42 - IN ORIGINAL SHRINK WRAP!

Background information

"Dieter KELLER (1909-1985) was a close friend of New Objectivity and Bauhaus artists before and during the Second World War. The contact he maintained over many years with Willi Baumeister, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ida Kerkovius and a friendship with Oskar Schlemmer, documented in over 90 letters, shaped his artistic vision and significantly influenced his photographic compositions. In 1941/42, he was stationed as a German soldier in the border region between Ukraine and Belarus. During this time, despite a strict military ban on photographing civilians and war victims, he managed to secretly expose several films and smuggle them into Germany. He photographed with a Soviet Leica replica, a so-called Fedka. After the war, he developed the rolls of 35mm film in his house in Stuttgart-Vaihingen and produced 201 unique enlargements. The negative films produced on a nitrocellulose base burned in 1958 due to spontaneous combustion.
Very early on, he used the means of serial and informal photography and created cinematic-looking image sequences to stimulate a subjective experience of reality. The photographic transfer of images of cruelty and apocalyptic-looking destruction into abstracting and formal image constructions therefore does not lead to the usual emotional flattening and blunting process of documentary photography, but rather intensifies the subjective consternation.

Content

Even by today's standards, the out-of-print photo book 'The Eye of War. Ukraine 1941/42' by Dieter KELLER follows a seemingly modern pictorial aesthetic, which on the one hand is due to the influence of his artist friends, but on the other hand also makes it clear that the artistically trained photographer of the Bauhaus period generally knew how to use aesthetic perception as a key to processing reality and coping psychologically.  In this respect, his disturbing images of war atrocities against the civilian population fit into the European pictorial tradition of war depictions, as shaped by the horror images of Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco de Goya or Otto Dix." (© Buchkunst Berlin, 2020)

Reception

Stefan Sauer, review of: Dieter Keller, Das Auge des Krieges/The Eye of War. Ukraine 1941/42. ed. by Norbert Moos, Berlin: Buchkunst Berlin 2020, in: Militaergeschichtliche Zeitschrift, Volume 80, Issue 2, November 10, 2021, © 2021 Walter de Gruyter

About German photographer, Dieter KELLER (1909-1985)

Photo books by as well as with works by Dieter KELLER