Halle an der Saale has about as much to do with Detroit in Michigan as Georg Friedrich Handel has with the rough rock of an Iggy Pop or the MC5. On the other hand, the half-ruined, half-abandoned Detroit of today doesn’t have much to do with the city that was once called “Motor City” and was considered the energy supplier for America’s pop music and protest culture. But then there is the photographer Leni Sinclair, who still ties it all together.
Because Leni Sinclair is not just the woman who, at the end of the sixties, together with the anarchist and poet John Sinclair in solidarity with the Black Panther Party founded the almost even more radical White Panther Party, which was also determined to be sexually unleashed, and who photographed Detroit’s flourishing music scene while her husband was managing MC5 or serving harsh prison terms for minor cannabis possession.
Portrait of the jazz musician and composer Sun Ra.
(Photo: Leni Sinclair / Leni Sinclair)
What is less well known: Leni Sinclair was born as Magdalena Arndt in Königsberg in 1940 and then grew up in a village in Saxony-Anhalt until she emigrated to America. So it is, so to speak, a celebratory homecoming that the now 81-year-old photographer and political activist is now hosting by the Saxony-Anhaltinische Akademie der Künste in Halle’s Literaturhaus, where a selection of her most beautiful and famous pictures has been on view since this weekend.
There, for example, the eternal Wayne Kramer stands, holds out his fist to the stars and stripes in a revolutionary greeting from the Panthers and not only has his guitar hanging on his back, but also an assault rifle: the cross between rock music and political militancy is rare At the end of the sixties it was literally put into the picture like with the guitarist of the MC5 as the Statue of Liberty in bell-bottoms. The insane floral pattern of his shirt alone, one must say, makes you so dizzy, as if you were falling down a flight of stairs with the chaotic record cover of “Kick out the Jams” in front of your eyes, from the wild, angry tones on this furious of all debut albums not to mention.
You have to admire the coolness with which she captured all the bursts of energy and anger without blurring
Proto-Punk has become the name for it. One could also speak of eruptions. Because Detroit was obviously a highly volcanic area in the late sixties and early seventies, and you have to admire Leni Sinclair as a photographer for the presence of mind and coolness with which she managed it, all these outbursts of energy, creativity, anger and lust to hold on without blurring. Of course, there are also quieter, almost melancholy images of her, such as the one in which the trumpeter Marcus Belgrave blows against the snowstorm in the cemetery at the funeral of a murdered Detroit jazz club owner, as if it were a set from a film that you finally get would have to look.
Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson and Wayne Kramer during the photo shoot for the first LP “Kick out the Jams” from MC5, 1968.
(Photo: Leni Sinclair / Leni Sinclair)
But especially many famous pictures were taken live during the concert, not least in Detroit’s legendary Grande Ballroom, which has been empty for ages and is falling into disrepair. It was here that New Year’s Eve 1968 “Kick out the Jams” was recorded, this is where Sinclair photographed the tender, naked young mans of the MC5, and here Iggy Pop lolled over the edge of the stage in front of her camera as mermaid-like on the microphone stand like the figurehead on a pirate ship. Iggy Pop rarely saw it that way gender-fluid like in the pictures by Leni Sinclair. Such things, but also the political partisanship of all these long-haired, young whites for the interests of blacks make Sinclair’s pictures from 50 years ago in a certain way very contemporary and urgent. But that’s the music from back then, if you just put it on again, yes, too.
Participant observer – Leni Sinclair. Literaturhaus Halle, until October 17th.