| | | | | | | | | © Nomi Baumgartl "Dolphins Silent Dialouge", Tatjana Patitz and Robala, Grand Bahama Island, 2001 | | | | | | Summertime | | | | 11 July – 22 September, 2017 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | © Nomi Baumgartl, 'The Naturalists Eye', Andreas Feininger, New Milford 1989 | | | | | | The world is full of paradoxes: speech without words, knowledge that no longer needs thoughts. It seems contradictions are what really drive us in life; the journey without routes and routine. Already in the sixth century the Chinese Zen master Kanchi Sosan taught that even if our words were exact and our thoughts correct, they would never correspond to the truth, since truth defies any logic and all expectations, leading through alleged deviations and contradictions.
Nomi Baumgartl has experienced such paradoxes. Born 1950, in Donauries, the photographer established herself as a sought-after photojournalist in the 1980s and 1990s. Her reportages were in demand; her portraits of super models such as Kate Moss and Tatjana Patitz were published in notable magazines. Everything went smoothly in her exceptional career until a turning point occurred midway in the photographer’s life: after a major car accident, followed by several years of rehabilitation, she not only had to learn to see again, her long-term memory also remained veiled in darkness. Years would pass until she was able to set out on a new beginning after this apparent endpoint; until - as the poetess Hilde Domin once said – she would dare to place her foot in the air again to determine if it would respond by carrying her. | | | | | | | | | | © Nomi Baumgartl, Glasses and Shell, New Milford, Connecticut 1989 | | | | | | With her injured eyes she had to learn how to photograph anew, as Nomi Baumgartl recounts today. Her eyes henceforth registered the depth of things rather than only resting on surfaces. One can repeatedly discover Nomi Baumgartl’s vision in her 36 individual photographs, shown by Johanna Breede, in her gallery rooms from July 11 until September 22, 2017: it is a vision, filled with great empathy and a deep understanding of the correlations of our existence. Baumgartl now visits nature more frequently; she photographs in the waters of the oceans, in the thick of the jungle or the eternal ice of the polar circles. In early 2000, she brought back stunning photographs of the Bahamas. She managed to create unique underwater images of dolphins and people for the organization „Dolphin Aid“ – images rich with playful, dancelike movements and the lightness of summer. As if Baumgartl’s own fate miraculously did not render her tougher, but rather more delicate and sensitive.
From now on eyes repeatedly appear in her photographs: in 1999 Baumgartl‘s camera captured a view of an isolated pupil of a wild dolphin; four years later it looked into the giant eye of an African elephant bull. Even within her probably most personal project to date – a portrait series of her long-time friend and colleague Andreas Feininger – Baumgartl repeatedly concentrates on his eyes. In one image she looks through a broken shell at his half-open eyelids, in another she focuses on the isolated eyeglasses of the photographer who died in 1999. It is particularly the eyes, which allow us to enter creation and perceive fellow creatures. In Baumgartl‘s work eyes function as doors – like openings into areas, which one perhaps once called the soul and through which we become connected to Baumgartl’s subjects in mysterious ways. Today, Nomi Baumgartl states, "In my newly given life I am still a photographer. The major difference, however, is that I have acquired a different awareness for the greater connections within our existence". Ralf Hanselle | | | | | | | | | | © Nomi Baumgartl, Tatjana Patitz & Ollie Ferguson, Grand Bahama Island 2000 | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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