Vertraute Fremde - Trusted Friends - a Jim Rakete exhibition in Hamburg

From 12 March, until 6 May 2010, the Hilaneh von Kories Gallery, Hamburg presents the VERTRAUTE FREMDE exhibition with black and white photographs by Jim Rakete.

Jim Rakete, born on New Year’s Day 1951 in Berlin, already took his camera with him as a schoolboy to rock concerts, student protests, theatre rehearsals and film sets, until he finally dropped school all together at the end of the ‘60s.

After many years of newspaper photography, magazine reports and album covers, he founded a creative workshop with friends in 1977, Berlin Kreuzberg, called Fabrik Rakete, which quickly developed to become a trend laboratory and management. The Fabrik (factory) managed acts such as the Nina Hagen Band, Interzone, Spliff, Cosa Rosa, Edo Zanki, Nena and die Ärzte and translated the scene’s visual language in the media.

By the end of the ‘80s, the mission had been completed. Rakete returned to photography and captured the backstage area of the celebrity world, in a sensitive, rather than a sensationalist way, and preferably in black and white too. In 2007, as silver photography was coming to an end, Rakete decided to go on a risky tour de force of Germany, armed with a Linhof plate camera, natural light and never-ending exposure times, to once again capture the country’s most significant individuals: without make-up, without a fuss, without the smoothing touches of Photoshop.

Thirty years after the founding of the Fabrik, a photo book was published on this series by Schirmer/Mosel: 1/8 Sekunde – Vertraute Fremde =Trusted Friends (GoSee reported). They are images of faces, which we are bound to be familiar with, as we seem them on TV and in magazines everyday. And still it is different, through the concentration, which a plate camera demands. The eighth of a second: a blink of the eye of classic photography, a pause which is banned from today’s fast paced media – Rakete sees it as a reward for the dual concentration, perhaps a short sample of the soul. And probably one of the last projects on film, which we can only fearfully hope will still be around tomorrow.

The people in the images are a cross section of Germany’s people; it is made up of celebrities, both current and from the past. Could the project have been realised with non-celebrities? – Probably not, as they do not have a public image, with which such images can be measured. The exhibition includes images of Wim Wenders, Peter Stein, Moritz Bleibtreu, Jenny Holzer, Helmut Schmidt, Christoph Waltz and Natalie Portman, amongst others.
They are completed with a portrait series, in cooperation with the Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein Film Funding Board. Portraits include Hannelore Hoger, Martina Gedeck and Kostja Ullmann, accompanied by personal statements on their connection to the film landscape in Northern Germany.