WOELCK, Peter - Dancing in Connewitz

"Peter WOELCK worked as a professional photographer in the GDR for various businesses and magazines after studying photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. In addition, he created a large collection of free works, especially in the field of portrait and architectural photography.
Images of the construction of the Berlin TV Tower, cityscapes from Leipzig and intense portraits from the 1960s to the 1980s document life in a country that no longer exists.

Opposite are photographs from the post-reunification period, in which Peter WOELCK tried again and again to gain a foothold as an independent advertising photographer.
The pictures also tell of the break in the biography of the photographer, an experience that affected many in his generation.
The book documents the attempt to bring the eclectic diversity of the archive into a sequence of images that does not aim for a photo-historical classification but, from today's perspective, creates its own, subjective narrative.

The accompanying text contributions are by Wilhelm Klotzek, the son of WOELCK, who administers the estate, but also deals artistically with the inheritance, by the writer and journalist Peter Richter and the curator Bettina Klein.
It will appear on the occasion of a second exhibition with Peter WOELCK's photographs 'PeWo's Report on the Situation of Youth' (Galerie Laura Mars, Berlin) and was funded by the Stiftung Kunstfonds with funding from VG Bild-Kunst. "(Publisher's text, © Fantome Verlag, 2014)

About the photographer, Peter WOELCK (1948 - 2010):

"The sensitive documentary of everyday life
OBITUARY His photos were more realistic than socialist realism allowed, and Peter WOELCK was not created to fight capitalism. On March 1, he died impoverished
What you can not or should not talk about, you have to take pictures of

Some of his photos are so compelling that they look like icons when you first see them. For example, the 1968 picture of the construction of the television tower at Alexanderplatz, which slowly rises above war-torn remains of Altberlin, which would soon be gone. A plan for a future, surreal Berlin sacrificed, the dimensions of which seemed to be more for a coming Titansgeschlecht to be and on its enormous roads, which had to give way to the small houses shortly thereafter, but then only the tiny Trabants would drive.

This picture was one of the most striking ones with which Peter WOELCK had paved the large windows of his apartment on Kastanienallee in the corner of Schwedter Strasse, where he was always amazed: about the humorous group of garbage men with their filthy garb on one side Barkas pickup truck leaning. Or the portrait of a garbage man with Marlon Brando appeal who seemed to fulfill almost the utopian image of the titanic race of the new human being, of whom socialism always dreamed. And at the same time it seemed to lead to absurdity.

It took a long time to realize that the dweller in the slightly rundown apartment was identical to the photographer of these incredible pictures. Until one day one went in and got to know Peter WOELCK. Prehistoric stone from the Kastanienallee, long before it had become the glamorous mile of the 'New Berlin' after 1989 as 'Casting-Allee', which is slowly getting older.

A man with his long henna mane and tight jeans with wide silver belts around his slim hips, looking like an old glamor rocker, prince charming of a bygone age of rock, still waiting to be kissed awake on his scuffed faux leather sofa. And on March 1, 2010 suddenly died.
A few days earlier, friends had to clean up his apartment where he had lived and worked since 1982. For after one and a half years he had finally lost the fight with the Miethaien to this prominent location directly on the border between the districts Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. At the provisional finissage at the end of February, where prints of his photos had once again been attached to the bare walls of the empty apartment, he could no longer attend. Because there he was already with a cancer in the hospital, which had been diagnosed in September 2009. There was no place where he could have returned from there.

Peter WOELCK was born on April 12, 1948 in Wilhelmshagen. He grew up with the maternal grandparents in Köpenick, under the stern but caring gestures of a grandfather who had been socialized in the Kaiserreich. A typical postwar childhood with parents who are too busy building their own lives to look after the tender little son who feels early that something is sleeping in him that adults would call a musical talent. And for whom the grandfather's piano becomes a point of longing, which is forbidden to touch him on punishment.

Taking pictures as an escape
His instrument becomes a camera, which he gets as a ten-year-old. He also discovers photographing as an escape route from his repressive life circumstances. First of all from the family, later also from the state, whose tightness Peter WOELCK knows how to capture in equally oppressive pictures, how he captures moments of exploding happiness in the very most private in his photos. What you can not or should not talk about, you have to take pictures of.

It is this silence, to which WOELCK's photographs owe their unprecedented intensity, their documentary conciseness. From all his pictures there is always a deep empathy with those who can be seen on them - such as miners from the uranium mining in the Erzgebirge or Leipzig philistines, who suddenly make the breadth of socialist city planning seem oppressively narrow.

At the age of twenty, 1968, WOELCK is invited by two grandmasters of GDR photography, Arno FISCHER and Sybille BERGEMANN, into the elite circle 'Club Junger Meister'.
Arno FISCHER is soon appointed as a guest lecturer for photography in Leipzig to the important Academy of Visual Arts, where in 1972 WOELCK also begins his studies. In these Leipzig years many of his most beautiful and important pictures are created.

In the GDR, he spent many years as a freelance photographer on the water, gets three children with three children, is not included in the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR, because his photos are too realistic to the ideas that the socialist realism of reality has to do justice.
Shortly before the turn, Peter WOELCK went in August 1989 as one of the last of his circle of friends in the West. In November 1989, he returns to his shop on Kastanienallee, which has survived the change of age almost untouched. He had kept the key.
However, it soon turns out that birds of paradise such as WOELCK are not equipped for survival in the wild. He works in the early 1990s as a photojournalist for a tabloid newspaper, which is soon set again, trying to gain a foothold in advertising - and earned in the end his money with photos for the display boards of snacks. If he deserves anything.

The absurd social legislation finally turns the photo artist into a social case, forcing him to give up his job in order to become eligible. Nevertheless, WOELCK wanders through the city with his camera until the end, selling his pictures to random strollers and tourists coming to his shop. Best, of course, the garbage men and the growing television tower. Until you take his livelihood with the apartment in every respect." (freely translated, © Esther Slevogt, in: the TAZ, obituary of 17.03.2010)