CHERRRYBOy Magazine — Bodily Reveries

Just as summer was opening its eyelids in France, one early afternoon I called German photographer Karin Szekessy; she in Avignon and I in Paris. We set out to detail the relationship with her late partner Paul Wunderlich and how it shaped some of their work. Her portraits have a fluency of expression that makes us forget she's even there. The pandemic denied me the chance to meet her in person - to portrait the portraitist myself.

only stupid people would DO photographY back then

Paul Wunderlich was born in a small town just outside Berlin, Szekessy in the West of Germany in the city of Essen. The two met through Wunderlich’s then girlfriend in 1961. Szekessy took his portrait and a couple of years later they were seeing each other. She told me she was married at the time, so theirs was a secret romance at the start. But by 1971 she was pregnant and they were married.

Money was sparse when they first met, unhelped by their status as industry oddities on both sides. Szekessy was one of the few female photographers of the late fifties and early sixties, navigating a world that was already testing enough without that added hurdle; 'only stupid people would do photography back then,' she told me. As a woman she was doubly hindered, yet she worked for magazines and supported herself and her children simultaneously. She recalled how, almost overnight, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up transformed photography's reputation, turning the profession into an object of glamour. Wunderlich, too, was a rarity in his own field, one of Germany's youngest professors, before giving up teaching in 1968, aged 36, to become a full-time artist.

Even in the earliest days of their collaboration, the two were drawn to strikingly similar subjects. Motifs seemed to pass between their practices as if by osmosis, each artist delighting in lending the Nude an eeriness that verged on darkness while maintaining caprice. Across both their bodies of work runs a shared, resonant surface quality as though a sheath of soot hangs between our eyes and their pictures, enveloping artist and viewer alike in a hazy, roguish vision.

Wunderlich's surfaces are dirtied with generous shadow, his often-chimeric women assembled from collaged body parts and faces, resplendent despite (or perhaps because of) their elongated limbs. Szekessy's lens by contrast is blurred and oneiric, conjuring fantastical, timeless women within domestic settings entirely reconfigured. Her regal figures recline beside unremarkable heaps of laundry as though the folds of fabric were mountain summits, and the women their sovereigns.

The pair (pictured above, 1971) published a book of the work they made together, titled Korrespondenzen in German in 1977, later translated into English as Transpositions in 1980. Earlier in their relationship, Szekessy explained, Wunderlich would occasionally ask for one of her photographs to paint from. His painting Daniela mit dem Tanzschuh corresponds to Szekessy's Daniela Stuhl Hell. As was typical of both their work, each depicts a single female figure. Hers sits within a stark, paper-lit scene, the young nude woman looking both bashful and at ease; his, rendered in his characteristic airbrushed finish, dissolves into disfigured forms that flit across the picture plane, carried by the same interior breeze that lifts the girl's hair.

Szekessy recalled that painting from photographs was unpopular at the time – it wasn't until they began showing the work that they earned real respect from their peers for it. Surrounded by artists like Gerhard Richter (who once received a photograph from Szekessy of Wunderlich shooting a rabbit), a wider experimentation across painting and photography was quietly percolating.

As one of the rarer working female photographers, Szekessy used the medium to experiment with the female body – to relish in it as much as depict it. That sense of play began early, photographing with girlfriends who gallivanted through interiors like children, delighting in objects and rooms as much as in each other. It never really left her work: in later years she often photographed the daughters and granddaughters of those friends, sometimes returning to the same women across several years. She was also a regular receiver of phone calls from friends in the process of moving out asking to take photos in the recently emptied rooms, filled with the dust of the freshly relocated. It's this that lends the photographs their otherworldly quality: both women and environment stripped bare, made strange through nothing more than the rearrangement of a room; a subtle defamiliarisation of the everyday.

She recalled the time she met and photographed Hans Bellmer, then living in a spare, dim room on Rue Mouffetard in the fifth arrondissement of Paris – kitchen and bed crowded into the same space. She was around twenty-three, captivated by his work with disfigured and reassembled dolls. She told me she'd longed to play with dolls as a girl, a luxury rarely afforded her amid post-war rationing; when she finally received one at twelve she threw herself into the play with a vengeance by decapitating it, reconfiguring its small body into something closer to a surrealist picture than a toy.

So Szekessy and Bellmer met, and she took his portrait. In one image, he studies one of his fragmented dolls with intensity, her disturbing pose inviting a sexual reading even as it reckons with the barrage of mutilated bodies that had haunted the European imagination through the first half of the century. Szekessy, too, favoured the fractured body in her own work – a woman wrapped in a scarf to appear armless, another rendered nearly spectral by the use of long exposure, present only as a blur. Theirs was hardly a singular preoccupation: no shortage of artists in the wake of the Second World War turned to the transfigured flesh, to the newly uncertain body. Bellmer predominantly created dolls that were all torso: no limbs or face, or rendered as drawings of genitals fitted, disquietingly, with eyes and a mouth. Szekessy's blurred faces and mask-wearing women speak to the same impulse: a reckoning with disfigurement, and with the disfigurement and psychological damage of German post-war trauma.

Beyond Bellmer, she has photographed luminaries like Joseph Beuys and James Baldwin – eminent company. Unintimidated, Szekessy did her research, found common ground with whoever sat before her lens, then worked so unobtrusively that her subjects scarcely registered the moment passing before it was already gone. The results are warm, unanxious: Baldwin sits high on a stained wall under a cloudy sky, smiling mid-conversation. Her portraits meet every subject with the same unguarded curiosity, drawing us into an easy, playful tête-à-tête with some of the twentieth century's greatest cultural minds.

A few years before his death in 2010, Wunderlich turned almost exclusively to sculpture, working in cast liquid bronze that solidified into forms which retained their fluidity, like supernatural shapes caught mid-motion. He made a chess set and even a range of crockery: the Rosenthal Mythos cups and saucers are designed to be lifted by their wings, as if they would fly if airborne rather than plummeting and smashing into smithereens as expected.

the Rosenthal Mythos cups are to be lifted by their wings

Many of the sculptures now stand in the garden of Szekessy's home in Provence, where she divides her time between France and Hamburg. She has worked in digital photography since 2000, glad to be free of the toxic darkroom chemicals she couldn't avoid earlier in her career. She hasn't been to Germany in over a year – the pandemic has kept her from her family, though they're expected in a fortnight, so I wish her a good visit and say my goodbyes. I picture them in the garden afterward, pouring cold drinks in the Avignon sun, surrounded by Wunderlich's bronze sculptures.

@karinszekessy

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