12/18/2023 0 Comments Theatre photographyOrlando by Virginia Woolf at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. It has always been important to me that I not be an outside entity on any production, someone who solely captures the final outcome, but rather that I get involved from the outset and help shape the creative process as a participant observer. Working on that production greatly impacted my concept of theatre photography and also broadened it. “In 1980, Peter Stein staged Aeschylus’s Oresteia at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibit, she wrote (translation provided by the museum) the following: It is in fact her experience photographing Stein’s Oresteia that shaped Walz’s vision of the task of the theatre photographer. That is because she travelled with the company when they toured. There are even photos of the production in the amphitheatre located in the ancient Roman harbour, now an inland archaeological site, of Ostia Antica. Among these is the section of Walz’s photos of Peter Stein’s 1984 Oresteia ( Die Orestie by Aeschylus) for the Schaubühne. There are several rooms or delineated spaces in the exhibit dedicated to Walz’s work in relation to the playwright (specifically, various Shakespeare productions she photographed), scene designers or artists such as Jannis Kounellis, and specific actors and directors. Photos from that era are invaluable for theatre researchers who concentrate on the work of German directors Peter Stein and Klaus-Michael Grüber as well as on international directors who were collaborators with Walz: Swiss Luc Bondy, Polish Krzystof Warlikowski, Americans Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson, Russian Dmitri Tcherniakov, and Italian Romeo Castellucci.ĭörte Lyssewski and Gérard Desarthe in Schändung by Botho Strauss. These four are contemporaries, and although Ruth Walz still works as a photographer (she was born in 1941), her major contributions to the art form of recording the ephemeral moments of drama on stage were during the 1970s and 1980s when she was permanently associated with the Schaübuhne (then called the Berlin Schaubühne am Hallesches Ufer). During 2018, four currently active theatre photographers were interviewed by me for the magazine version that antedates the present digital version: Johan Persson and Marc Brenner in London, Laurencine Lot in Paris, and Iko Freese in Berlin. The collection of Ruth Walz’s photos contributes to the field of theatre photography that Plays International & Europe has always championed. L to r: Wolfgang Michael, Sylvester Groth, Peter Simonischek, Ulrich Matthes Splendid’s by Jean Genet at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin 1994. It is easy to praise as an exhibit but demands a more complicated response in terms of its underlying approach to the art of theatre photography itself. There were over 500 photographs on exhibit, representing over five decades of professional photographs for the theatre and opera taken and developed by Walz. I am grateful to Dr Ludger Derenthal, head of the photo collection department of Berlin’s Museum of Photography for a tour of the exhibit of the photos by Berlin-based theatre photographer Ruth Walz that ran from 8 October 2021 to 13 February 2022. An Exhibit in the Berlin Museum of Photography.
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