The landscapes of Bavaria are full of contradictions. In front of the mountains they present themselves as gracefully as ever, elsewhere the wasteland of endless cornfields and commercial areas stretches out. Economic pressures have changed the country more in the past 70 years than in the previous five centuries. This raises a question that has occupied the photographer and filmmaker Valentin Schwab (1948-2012) his whole life: has everything really gotten better as a result?
How different the country looked 50 years ago has been all but forgotten in the rushing pace of progress. The reality that Schwab captured back then in the Lower Franconian province gives the impression that he was traveling in another world. He photographed villages when agriculture was still the norm there. And he photographed people who had no idea about milking robots and GPS guidance systems.
“But Valentin Schwab wasn’t a village photographer who wanted to glorify the supposedly good old days,” says art historian Henrike Holsing, who is currently curating an exhibition about his rich photographic work at the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg. His intention reached far beyond his immediate homeland.
One thing becomes clear at first glance: Schwab’s photographs have an extraordinary charisma. No wonder, he put in an enormous amount of effort and often returned to an object several times until he found the conditions for a photograph to be satisfactory. “He is one of the great unknowns in the history of German photography,” says Holsing. In terms of consistency, committed attitude and quality, his work is unparalleled in 20th-century German documentary photography.
Manual work out in the field: farmer’s wife raking, photographed in 1975/76.
(Photo: Valentin Schwab/ Valentin Schwab Archive, Karlstadt)
Plow team in the Rhön, photographed in 1977.
(Photo: Valentin Schwab/Valentin Schwab Archive, Karlstadt)
Already during his studies in Kassel in the 1970s, Schwab often returned to his Franconian homeland, which changed a lot in those years. After land consolidation and local government reform, the smallholders slowly disappeared, and there were fewer children playing happily on the street. Likewise, the old, draughty houses gave way to modern buildings that offered more comfort. Except that they no longer radiate flair. A development that found its absurd climax in the arbitrariness of the building style and in the rock gardens.
Schwab’s life’s work grew out of his observations. For him, says Henrike Holsing, it was not just about capturing the people and the country, documenting the changes and preserving the passing, but also about depicting and questioning developments.
Family portrait from the village of Gauaschach, undated.
(Photo: Valentin Schwab/Valentin Schwab Archive, Karlstadt)
“Autonomy and self-determination”, these topics moved him a lot, says Holsing. And they took him far beyond Lower Franconia. Schwab’s work reflects the belief that art can bring about change. Together with the director Manfred Vosz, Schwab traveled to the world’s crisis areas to document the life and the will to resist of the population – films such as “The Bare Feet of Nicaragua” and “Mothers, Dollars and a War” won prizes in the 1980s.
Child soldier, untitled, taken in El Salvador, 1986.
(Photo: Valentin Schwab,/Valentin Schwab Archive, Karlstadt)
Schwab often accompanied people for months. In Eritrea, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba, he not only made films of impressive authenticity, but also photo series in which he intensively captured people’s lives.
At home, however, he wandered almost obsessively through Lower Franconian villages and the countryside with his camera – several meters of shelves of negative material in his estate, sorted alphabetically from A for Arnstein to Z for Zellingen, bear witness to decades of forays. But that’s not all. He also collected historical photographs simply by ringing the doorbell and asking people for old photos.
For him, Schwab’s home region is an example of the social upheavals of the 20th century that were noticeable everywhere in the western world. According to Holsing, his approach, which always sees the individual work as part of a multi-layered complex, also gives Valentin Schwab’s work supra-regional relevance.
Dirt road near Rohrbach, photographed in 1992.
(Photo: Valentin Schwab/ Valentin Schwab Archive, Karlstadt)
Schwab’s work can be seen again for the first time in 20 years. The retrospective in the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg presents around 150 black-and-white photographs as well as rarely shown documentaries.
Looking at the exhibition, however, one also realizes that, despite Schwab’s uniqueness, there were always photo artists in Bavaria in particular who were inspired by a similar motivation as he was and who left behind a fantastic, but often underappreciated legacy. One example is Heidi Glatzel, who took pictures of the countryside in Lower Bavaria in the 1970s. Like Schwab, she shows small farmers who led a life of poverty and confinement, alienated remnants of a sunken peasant world. For her, too, it is not a nostalgic reminiscence, but a view of a world that was already lost in the present and whose work and deprivation had etched itself into the faces and bodies of these people.
It is amazing that this photographic tradition is still carried on, with a skill that goes far beyond the arbitrariness of modern photographic possibilities. Last but not least, Valentin Schwab’s legacy is reflected in the pictures taken by the Bavarian Forest photographers Bruno Mooser, Raphael Guarino and Martin Waldbauer.
Valentin Schwab – a retrospective. Museum in the Kulturspeicher Würzburg, Oskar-Laredo-Platz 1, until May 21, Tel. 0931-322250.