THE YEARS The Autobiographical Woman in

Kerstin Stremmel

Marion Kalter’s work is made up of various elements, but it is not until an entire piece is seen that the work methods used to create them can be discerned. Characteristic of these work methods are Kalter’s aesthetic and thematic subjectivity and her intensity. The result is a construct of narrative identity that is neither linear nor finalized. Her artistic process involves, among other things, the combination of found materials some of them radical presenteations of the self and conventional portrait photography often distinguished by a strong personal interest in the sitters, as well as Kalter’s sense of closeness to a particular scene. Her photographic processes can be more or less strictly conceptual, intuitive, or almost classically journalistic, while her techniques range from collages of historical photos to classic black-and-white photographs printed on baryta paper to cell phone photographs. In their entirety, the pictures outline a life fluctuating among diverse fixed points and places; these are briefly identified in the following to make more tangible the disparate nature of (each) life in which history and cultural history reflect a certain era. It should remain clear that these photographs are, to a certain degree, images whose meaning consists of a synthesis of two intentions, as Vilém Flusser described them: one that manifests in the picture, while the other is the viewer’s. Images are not “‘denotative’ (unambiguous) complexes of symbols . . . but ‘connotative’ (ambiguous) complexes of symbols” that “provide space for interpretations.” 1

Some of Kalter’s rare color photographs capture various objects from the front: a knitted, dark blue, moth-eaten swimming suit that makes the skin itch just by looking at it; a packet of extra thin, hermetically sealed condoms no longer recommended for use; lipsticks from Max Factor’s Hi-Society series, with names such as “Too Too Pink” and “Strawberry Pastel”; and what is perhaps the most classic of all perfumes, Chanel No. 5 (p. 162/163). They come from the attic of the house in Chabenet, in central France, where the Kalter family took up residence in the early 1950s. Her parents met in Salzburg after the war. At the age of thirteen, Marion Kalter’s Jewish father had been able to emigrate from Germany to the United States, where he became an American citizen. Initially, he took his Austrian wife and their daughter, born six years after the war, to the United States, but from there, the family moved to France. The objects Kalter finally took out of the suitcases fifty years after the move are recorded objectively without being staged, as if they were “evidence,” to use a word from Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

They illustrate that what was once carefully tucked away can be forgotten for a long time before it is reawakened by an artist and becomes an indication of the reality of a life and the emotions associated with it.

One of the best portraits of Walter Benjamin was taken by sociologist, photography historian, and photographer Gisèle Freund. Marion Kalter interviewed her and did a few portraits of her. In one picture she can be seen sitting at a desk, concentrated and relaxed. More suggestive of relationships is a portrait that Kalter took during a visit to an exhibition in 1979; Freund was looking at photographs in the Paris branch of the Galerie Zabriskie, where Kalter captured her likeness in profile. But the picture is dominated by a fellow photographer, Berenice Abbott (p. 126). It is her photos that can be seen on display in the background, such as the picture in the upper left, depicting Jean Cocteau’s delicate hands clasping his hat, taken in 1925 Abbott’s portraits of Eugène Atget, who documented old Paris and was nearly forgotten during his own lifetime, were shot at the same time. By buying his estate after his death, she rendered an outstanding service to his international reception: in 1968 her collection was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Walter Benjamin had already described Abbott’s role in his essay “A Short History of Photography”: “Berenice Abbot [sic] of New York collected them together and a selection has appeared in a very fine volume.” 2

Benjamin’s essay on photography and Roland Barthes’s “Reflections on Photography” have often been compared to each other. Jacques Derrida believed their essays “could very well be the two most significant texts on the so-called Referent in the modern technical age.” 3

Kalter shot an austere portrait of Barthes: framed in the wooden frame of a window or door, he is seen in profile; light from the left falls on his face. He is aware of his pose, but despite his folded arms, he seems agreeable to the act of being photographed (p. 144).

I decide to ‘let drift’ over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be ‘indefinable,’ in which I might suggest, along with the qualities of my nature, my amused consciousness of the whole photographic ritual: I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality. 4

Camera Lucida, the book from which this quote was taken, was Roland Barthes’s last publication; it was published in 1980 the year of his death. Marion Kalter’s photograph was taken the year before. What Barthes describes as a characteristic of photography its ability to fix a moment of life, thus making it possible to see the transience of the individual in the photograph, while also mortifying life at the same time also occurs in the tranquil photo of the author, who gazes to the left, toward the past: it shows us what was soon to be no more.

The central image Barthes describes in his book is a photograph of his mother:

Hence I was leafing through the photographs of my mother according to an initiatic path which led me to that cry, the end of all language: ‘There she is!’ . . . a sudden awakening, outside of ‘likeness,’ a satori in which words fail, the rare, perhaps unique evidence of the ‘So, yes, so much and no more.’ 5

This photo exists, as Barthes describes it, exclusively for himself; for others it would be irrelevant.

Another of Kalter’s photos is of her mother, and it has a special meaning. It was taken by accident, in Washington, DC, where Kalter spent the first two years of her life. Her mother had studied at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and then performed in plays for German soldiers at the front during the war; she continued in the theater, for example in Graz, after the war. But in Washington she worked in a color photography lab. Kalter found a series of Kodachrome photos that her parents had taken of each other, as well as that picture of her mother, which may have been taken by her father, but was probably taken by Marion Kalter herself (p. 161). Her mother’s face is cropped, framed by dark curls; the eyes are not visible, but the pronounced nose, the high cheekbones, and above all the lipsticked mouth (with Max Factor “Bewitching Coral”?) and the elegant black dress that exposes half of her shoulders and draws the eye to the flower-adorned décolleté. Despite its fragility, the figure seems monumental, because she is photographed from a slightly lower angle, which is why it is quite conceivable that a child pressed the shutter release here. What makes the effect suggestive even for the uninitiated are the fascinating colors: the green background that contrasts with the orange-red lips. There was disgruntlement in 2009, when Kodak announced that it would stop manufacturing Kodachrome film, the first commercially successful three-color film with the ability to reproduce colors naturally; it was the preferred slide film of many professional and amateur photographers from the mid-1930s to the 1990s. People may have stewed over it owing to the film’s legendary durability (like Super-8 film in this respect), among other things, but also probably because of the catchy 1973 song by Paul Simon:

Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colors

They give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah

I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph So, mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.

Further on, the lyrics tell us that Kodachrome memories are always somewhat nicer than reality. It cannot be denied that Kodachrome was a considerable contribution to color photography, and that it took a long time for it to be accepted in museums. “Everything looks better in color” was one of Kodak’s famous ad slogans, and it is not difficult to imagine what a revolution its invention must have been at first. Film colors were certainly never again as green as they were in those days.

In my eyes, however, the portrait’s main point is the two shadows the woman casts onto the green wall shadows that still seem to be falling across the photographer’s life. Another picture in this series, surely also taken by Marion Kalter when she was very young, is blurry; only the outlines of her mother and father can be seen, as if in a dream in which it is impossible to focus (p. 150/151). It brings to mind a literary snapshot by French writer Annie Ernaux, whose book The Years I will discuss later: “all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life, and you walk down unidentifiable roads.” 6

The fact that Marion Kalter’s mother died when her daughter was a teenager makes her desire to understand the past even more logical: What was the love like between an emigrant and a woman who entertained German soldiers? What was it like for her father to return to Europe, to Germany even, where he worked for the American military in Heidelberg, not far from his old hometown? There she produced, among other things, a tentative series of photos in his office; in one of them he hides his face behind a Groucho Marx mask the face of the comic, who, in the 1932 film Horse Feathers, proclaimed, “Whatever it is I’m against it” (p. 165). In Munich, where Kalter took the last photograph of her father during the carnival season in 1995, he is adorned in confetti. Behind him stands an organ grinder (p. 153). Perhaps it is a coincidence, but it is one that recalls Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey) and the last lines of “Der Leiermann” (The Organ-Grinder):

And he lets everything go on As it will; He plays, and his hurdy-gurdy Never stops.

Strange old man, Shall I go with you?

Will you grind your hurdy-gurdy

To my songs? 7

The few examples of Kalter’s familiar universe give a sense of her subjective use of photography. Susan Sontag, long the partner of a woman photographer, wrote an essay titled “On Photography,” which could also be called “Against Photography,” since it is against the inherently exploitative nature of “shooting” photos, the aggressiveness of the act. This applies to both news photography and the kind that observes from a distance; Kalter and many other photographers decided not to practice this type of “objective” photography. Sontag’s essay was printed in book form in 1977, and in 1979 Kalter produced a portrait of the author, who is also standing in a doorframe, like many of her other sitters (p. 129). Here is another major figure in photography theory, who described the act of taking photographs as follows: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects . . .” 8 Where did Marion Kalter acquire her affinity for the great theorists, and how does she manage to make them seem like themselves in front of her camera?

Kalter began by studying painting in the United States, adding photography in 1974 One of the causes of this kind of approach to the world was male. Kalter is confident enough to point out the role played in her socialization by the beatnik jazz poet Ted Joans. Her relationship with him gave her access to the scene in and around the Parisian branch of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, an important meeting place for the beat generation of the 1950s, where writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William S. Burroughs met. They all sat for Kalter, as did James Baldwin (p. 93). She also got her first job thanks to Joans at La Photogalerie, a bookstore and gallery where she saw many exhibitions while schooling her eye and making contacts. Many of those she portrayed especially influential female figures were part of her life. It was not the objective eye, the analysis, that was crucial to her, but her personal affinity.

Enthusiasm, affection, and curiosity also gave significant momentum to Kalter’s interest in jazz and its leading figures. The most revealing picture in this context, a portrait of Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie, was the product of a double exposure. Reexposing the film a second time creates a sense of crowding and atmospheric density that reproduces more of the actual mood than perfect staging, ideal framing, or even a successful snapshot would.

So you see the massive bassist taking a break, while the puffy-cheeked trumpeter on the same print blows into his curved instrument.

This photo was taken in 1975 in Juan-les-Pins, yet before and after that music played an important role in Kalter’s life. When she took the Trans-Siberian Express to Beijing in 2017 she was reminded of her father’s uncle, who fled from the Nazis on this train in 1940. She named a series of pictures that she took from the window of the sleeping car during this journey (all of which give the impression of intense cold) after Steve Reich’s piece Different Trains, which could be described as a journey through several layers of time (pp. 171-175). Besides four string players, you can hear locomotive whistles, other sounds of the railroad, and voices speaking. fast train trips in the US, before the first movement, “America—Before the War,” transitions into the second, “Europe During the War.” Here we have cattle cars “loaded with people.” In the third movement, “After the War,” the war is over, and again you hear survivors of the Holocaust: “There was one girl with a beautiful voice / And they loved to listen to the singing / The Germans / And when she stopped singing, they said, ‘More! More!’ and they applauded.”

Throughout her life Kalter has dealt with the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous; she remains a traveler who moves through different cultural circles with the certainty of a sleepwalker, the naturalness of a bird in flight a phrase Ted Joans used in his obituary of Thelonious Monk to describe his dealings with music: “He lived his music as natural as a bird flies.”

We should apply the concept of autobiographical writing to Kalter’s photography. “From The Pillow Book to Describing the Bedsheets” is the name of a chapter in Michaela Holdenried’s standard work Autobiografie, which is about the reconstruction of the female autobiography. The Pillow Book was written around the year 1000 by Lady Sei Shōnagon, and it is an intimate diary that presents a multifaceted genre picture of the imperial Japanese court.

In 1972 the Italian farm worker Clelia Marchi wrote her life story on a bedsheet when she ran out of paper. Published as a book in 1991, it tells of the difficult lives of Italy’s rural population. 9 The arc connecting these two publications is a long one, but their obvious authenticity and the numerous details imprinted on the mind while reading make them fascinating. This includes images like the following, by the Japanese court lady: “But how wonderful, too, is a dark cloud, which at the break of dawn slowly changes to a shadowy gray, the way that black and white blend until finally they melt into twilight.” 10

That sounds like the description of a black-and-white photograph, a form of art that Marion Kalter has mastered. The view from a window into a clearing is a timeless metaphor, although perhaps Sei Shōnagon was also interested in “saving something of the time that one will never again inhabit,” as Ernaux says in the last paragraph of her book The Years, which relates French history of recent decades in private photos and memories, among other things. Kalter herself once described her photographs as a visual diary of her life, and the intimacy of her pictorial sketches is comparable to the focus of autobiographers.

As mentioned at the beginning, Kalter allows room for chance and error. Hence, for her personal universe she also uses found photographs that have been marked by time. A picture of her as a young girl was so ruined by poor storage that her face became a dark spot. Next to her in the grass are the dials of two clocks; the hands of one are at a quarter after three, those of the other at just before six. What seems like a Surrealist arrangement is one of those coincidences that make Kalter’s work compelling: her cousin collected clocks to repair them. Here they act as a reference to the passing of time, which often seems like it is frozen during the teenage years. Ernaux’s lines from The Years, an autobiography devoid of plot lines, are like a comment on Kalter’s photographs: the images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way to sleep the images of a moment, bathed in a light that is theirs alone

They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. 11

Just as Ernaux’s autobiographical text does, Marion Kalter’s technique of combining different approaches to photography offers an inventory of a certain time, a sense of life. Kalter’s own history is compiled from details, so she captures the things that make these moments endure. The fact that they are inscribed with transience makes them precious.

1 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 8. 2 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 5–26, here 20. 3 Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in The Work of Mourning trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31–68, here 39. 4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 11. 5 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 109. 6 [Translated] Published in English as Annie Ernaux, The Years trans. Alison L. Strayer (New York et al.: Seven Stories Press 2017). 7 Franz Schubert, Winterreise (Winter Journey), trans. Richard Wigmore (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 2009), xix. 8 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 14. 9 Clelia Marchi, Il tuo nome sulla neve: Gnanca na busìa; Il romanzo di una vita scritta su un lenzuolo [1991] (Milan: Saggiatore 2012). 10 [Translated] Published in English as Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book trans. Meredith McKinney (London and New York: Penguin 2006). 11 Ernaux, The Years

Arles 1976 eine junge Frau, 25 Jahre, ehemals Studentin der Bildenden Künste, auf der Suche, inszeniert sich selbst vor der Kamera (S. 56). Die Sequenz der ausgewählten Motive zeigt sie, bis auf zwei Ausnahmen, in einem scheinbar leer stehenden Innenraum. Sie trägt stets dieselbe Kleidung, eine weiße schulterfreie Bluse und einen geblümten Rock. Mithilfe eines Stuhls variiert sie die verschiedensten Posen: die Hände verschränkt im Schoß, den Körper von der Kamera abgewandt und zum Fenster gedreht, mit einer Hand an eine Tür geklammert und die andere vor die Stirn geschlagen oder gar hinter dem Stuhl kauernd und durch die Speichen der Stuhllehne in die Kamera schauend. Andere Aufnahmen zeigen sie auf dem Boden sitzend und fast traumversunken, die Augen geschlossen, Arme und Beine in leichter Bewegungsunschärfe durch das Wiegen des Körpers. Die Türen spielen eine große Rolle, sie stehen geöffnet, strukturieren den Bildraum und vermitteln den Eindruck des Unbewohnten, als handle es sich um eine leere Fabrik oder eine alte Schule. In zwei Aufnahmen kommt man der jungen Frau näher: Diesmal hat sie den Apparat in der Hand und fotografiert sich in einem alten Spiegel vor einer Wand weißer Fliesen. Als Mise en Abyme stehen die beiden Spiegelbilder ganz paradigmatisch für einen Moment der Selbstbefragung. Ist es die Suche, ein wenig klischeehaft, nach der Rolle im Leben, oder sind die inszenierten Momente des Sich-Nahekommens und SichFremdwerdens einfach fotografische Stilübungen auf der Suche nach einem guten Bild?

Florian Ebner

Die Fotosession allein mit sich und vor der Kamera sei angeregt gewesen, so sagt es Marion Kalter, die Frau auf den Fotografien, 45 Jahre später, von den Diskussionen mit dem Magnum-Fotografen David Hurn. An anderer Stelle erinnert sie an den Film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), der im gleichen Jahr in die Kinos kam und dessen Regisseurin, Chantal Akerman, sie vor dem Plakat ihres Films porträtieren wird (S. 119). Marion Kalter gehört zu jenen, dies sei schon vorweggenommen, die die Kamera als emanzipatorisches Ausdruckswerkzeug begreifen, sowohl hinsichtlich sozialer Rollenzuschreibungen wie auch gegenüber einem zu engen Korsett der Kunst und Malerei jener Jahre. Wie so viele Künstlerinnen der 1970er-Jahre greift auch sie auf diesen Apparat zurück.

Beim Navigieren durch die Bildauswahl dieser Ausstellung musste ich unweigerlich an den Titel eines Buchs denken: Der lange Sommer der Theorie heißt eine Abhandlung des Historikers Philipp Felsch über die deutsche Rezeptionsgeschichte der (zumeist) französischen strukturalistischen und poststrukturalistischen Philosophie und Theorie anhand der Geschichte des Berliner MerveVerlags. 1 Nicht nur die französischen Intellektuellen auf Marion Kalters Fotografien (Roland Barthes und Claude Lévi-Strauss) haben diese Assoziation ausgelöst, vielmehr sind die vielen verschiedenen Arten des Sommers, die sich in Kalters Bildern entdecken lassen, der Ausgangspunkt für die Überlegung: Gab es denn auch einen „Sommer der Fotografie“? Doch wann beginnt dieser Sommer und wann beginnt er für Marion Kalter?

Da gibt es gewiss die ersten warmen Tage der mit einer Kamera experimentierenden acht Jahre alten Marion während eines Sommeraufenthalts bei einer englischen Familie auf der Kanalinsel Jersey (S. 158) oder die 23-jährige Studentin, einmal nackt und einmal angezogen auf der familiären Couch (S. 164). Vielleicht begann der eigentliche Sommer im Jahr 1974, als sie den Beatnik, Jazzmusiker und Poeten Ted Joans kennenlernt und als das begann, was sie die „Teducation“ nannte. Als Gefährtin an der Seite des 23 Jahre älteren Joans wird sie in eine Welt eingeführt, die für die geistige Befreiung und soziale Emanzipation des 20. Jahrhunderts steht. Vielleicht war für sie, die 24-jährige junge Studentin der Kunst und nunmehr der Literatur, die Kamera das adäquate Mittel, an dieser künstlerischen und intellektuellen Welt teilzuhaben: Joyce Mansour, Régis Debray und Gabriel García Márquez auf einer überladenen Couch sitzend zu fotografieren (S. 91), oder Steven Taylor, Allen Ginsberg und Peter Orlovsky lauthals bei einer Performance im Garten des American Centers in Paris (S. 83), eine Reihe von Aufnahmen von James Baldwin und Ted Joans, aus denen die pure Freude des Wiedersehens und der Zusammenarbeit spricht. Oder zwei wunderbare und doch ganz verschiedene Aufnahmen von William S. Burroughs: ein Querformat von 1977, Burroughs hat der Kamera den Rücken zugewandt, an einem vereinzelten Tisch im hel- len Scheinwerferlicht vor der gähnenden Schwärze des Raumes, oder Burroughs sechs Jahre später, diesmal von vorne fotografiert, in sich versunken und fast noch abwesender als auf dem Bild zuvor (S. 75, 77).

Dank der „Teducation“ erhält Marion Kalter auch Zugang zur Welt der Musik, zum Jazz, sie fotografiert auf dem Festival in Juan-les-Pins Dizzy Gillespie auf der Bühne und Charles Mingus, als er sich an der Bar eine Zigarre anzündet. Es wohnt diesen Bildern noch der Zauber des Anfangs inne und vielleicht auch die Schüchternheit der jungen Frau an der Seite des erfahrenen Künstlers. Eine ihrer schönsten Aufnahmen gelingt ihr bei einem gemeinsamen Besuch mit Ted Joans in der Wohnung von Dorothea Tanning, als sie dort einen weiteren Gast mit der Kamera überrascht. John Cage blickt kurz auf, eingebaut in die symmetrische Bildkomposition durch die beiden Spulen des Magnetofons, die beiden Muscheln des Kopfhörers und die beiden Hände des Komponisten. Kalters Bild zeichnet einen intensiven Blick auf, die Musik ist ausschließlich dem Komponisten vorbehalten (S. 145).

Über Ted Joans bekommt sie auch ihren ersten Job in einer der ersten Galerien, die sich der Fotografie widmen –Mitte der 1970er-Jahre, als die kulturelle Institutionalisierung der Fotografie im Werden begriffen war: im Erdgeschoss die Galerie, im ersten Stock ein Geschäft für Plattenkameras, im dritten Stock die Agentur Magnum Photos. Da Marion Kalter fließend Englisch und Deutsch spricht, wird sie als Übersetzerin der boomenden Workshops des noch jungen, 1969 in Arles gegründeten Fotofestivals Les rencontres internationales de la photographie engagiert. Allerspätestens in diesem Moment beginnt der Sommer der Fotografie. Etwas ungläubig, ein wenig melancholisch und fast neidisch blickt man heute auf das muntere Treiben in Kalters Aufnahmen aus den Julitagen 1975 und 1976 in Arles. Nicht nur sind es gute Fotos, es sind auch besondere Dokumente der ersten Fotoworkshops, die legendär wurden. Die Aufnahmen lassen fast an Happenings denken, an öffentliche Sit-Ins, so groß scheint das Interesse der versammelten jungen Leute zu sein, für welche die Kleinbild-Spiegelreflexkameras von Nikon, Canon oder Olympus – genau eine solche hält sich Marion Kalter im bereits erwähnten Spiegelporträt vors Gesicht – die neuen Werkzeuge geworden sind, um sich für sich persönlich, politisch engagiert oder poetisch die Wirklichkeit zu erschließen. Die Apparate in den Händen haltend, umgehängt oder neben sich gestellt, hört die Schar der neuen Fotojünger gebannt zu, wenn Lucien Clergue im Freien stehend über die Fotografie predigt. Man sieht Ralph Gibson in einem kleinen Raum, umgeben von mindestens zwei Dutzend Workshop-Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer bei der Bildkritik, Zigarette in der rechten Hand und mit der linken die Probeabzüge blätternd – ein Moment angespannter Stille, der Marion Kalter die Zeit lässt, die Szene festzuhalten (S. 50). Gibson ist in jener Zeit einer der maßgeblichen Akteure des amerikanischen Fotografietransfers nach Europa, und das pittoreske, hochsommerliche Arles war ein zentrales Basislager. Mit seinen Serien The Somnambulist vom Beginn der 1970er-Jahre ist Gibson zum Inbegriff einer Fotografie geworden, die in Arles begeistert rezipiert wurde, seine Mischung aus magischem Realismus und grafischer Eleganz wurde von einer ganzen Generation inhaliert und imitiert. Es war eine Form von Fotografie, über die man noch publikumswirksam sprechen konnte: „Sag mir, was du mit der Kamera erzählen möchtest, und ich sage dir, wie du es grafisch umsetzt, dass es ein gutes Bild wird.“

Für die junge Marion Kalter, das übersetzende und interpretierende Sprachrohr, müssen diese Erfahrungen prägend gewesen sein, wie sie es selbst mit Verweis auf den Magnum-Fotografen David Hurn formuliert hat. Neben den Bildbesprechungen und Seminaren mit Garry Winogrand und Guy Le Querrec (S. 51), oder Verena von Gagern an einem Tisch im Freien, umgeben von Abzügen – eine Fotografin, deren Werk ein wenig in Vergessenheit geraten ist –, sieht man die Workshops auch in Aktion, im Moment der Aufnahme, und man wundert sich über die ungeheure freigesetzte Energie, etwa wie bei Floris Neusüss im Innern einer Kirche beim Choreografieren einer Reihe von Männern, bevor sie als lebender Fries zu lebensgroßen Ganzkörper-Fotogrammen werden. Der Happening-Charakter setzt sich bei den Workshops fort, wo die ambitionierten Fotoamateure bei Jean-Pierre Sudre in dessen Haus in Lacoste zu Gast sind und ganz im emanzipatorischen Sinne der 1970er-Jahre nicht nur die Fotomodelle des Aktworkshops nackt sind, sondern auch die zumeist männlichen Teilnehmer. Über die künstlerische Relevanz mancher dieser Workshops lässt sich heute streiten. Marion Kalter gelingt hierzu eine wunderbare, etwas ironische Aufnahme: Ebenfalls am Swimmingpool von Jean-Pierre Sudre sind fünf Fotografen zu sehen, darunter die beiden Magnum-Fotografen David Hurn und Guy Le Querrec sowie Will McBride, die sich um zwei Aktmodelle scharen (S. 53). Die wahre Kunst bestand wohl damals darin, keinen weiteren Kollegen mit Kamera auf dem Bild zu haben und doch zugleich in der ariden Landschaft des französischen Südens ein wenig an Edward Weston zu erinnern.

Marion Kalters Porträts Pariser Intellektueller und Künstler aus den späten 1970er- und 1980er-Jahren führen uns zu dem eingangs zitierten langen Sommer der Theorie, der bereits aus Pariser Perspektive ein Spätsommer war: Der 73-jährige Claude Lévi-Strauss, der große Anthropologe und Strukturalist, wirft einen Blick zurück über die Schulter auf die etwas ehrfurchtsvolle junge Fotografin (S. 143). Die beiden so unterschiedlichen Philosophen Emil Cioran und Emmanuel Levinas, beide wie so viele aus Osteuropa nach Paris gekommene Intellektuelle, sitzen für Kalter Porträt: Cioran in seiner kleinen Dachgeschosswohnung im Quartier Latin und Emmanuel Levinas, ein wenig zusammengefaltet, in seinem Stuhl, in der gleichen Schräglage wie all die Publikationen, die in dem Sessel neben ihm Platz gefunden haben. Beide blicken sie ein wenig skeptisch oder nachdenklich, aber lassen die Fotografin mit ihrer französisch-deutsch/österreichisch-amerikanischen Identität gewähren. Die wunderbare Aufnahme Roland Barthes entstand 1979, in dem Jahr, in dem er Die helle Kammer. Bemerkung zur Photographie fertigstellte. Barthes nimmt keine Notiz von der Fotografin. Sein Körper ist abgewandt, im Profil, der Blick aus dem Fenster oder vielmehr nach innen gerichtet (S. 144). Man beginnt Barthes Porträt unweigerlich mit dessen Gedanken über die Fotografie zu lesen, etwa dessen Passage über die verschiedenen Temporalitäten, die in der Betrachtung von Alexander Gardners Porträt des zum Tode verurteilten Attentäters Lewis Payne am Werke sind: „Er ist tot und er wird sterben.“ 2

Sieht man im Porträt des abgewandten Philosophen bereits den Todeswunsch, den ihm einige seiner Wegbegleiter in den letzten Monaten seines Lebens attestierten? Barthes wird nur wenige Monate nach der Aufnahme an den Folgen eines Unfalls sterben. Ob er sich in diesem Foto wiedergefunden hätte, zumindest bescheinigt das Studium dieses Bildes, dass wir es mit einem Gelehrten am Fenster zu tun haben. Geschätzt hätte er an vielen Porträts Kalters, dass sie die dargestellte Person nicht „überdeterminieren“, sie nicht überfrachten mit vorgefasster Bedeutung und mit erläuterndem Sinn. Viel liegt daran, dass ihre Bilder aus schnellen Beobachtungen heraus entstehen, Schnappschüsse oder – in der Sprache der Musik „Impromptus“ –Improvisationen sind, die aus der Gnade des Augenblicks heraus entstehen und ihren Charme auch aus der Schlichtheit der eingefangenen Geste oder des gewählten Moments beziehen.

Eric Rohmer betritt schwungvoll einen Seminarraum (S. 125) oder Robert Wilson kramt bei einem öffentlichen Vortrag in seinen Erinnerungen, Luigi Nono greift in einem Aufnahmestudio zur Kamera (S. 148) oder Pierre Boulez probt vor leeren Rängen (S. 147) – überhaupt taucht die Welt der Musik in den Bildern Marion Kalters seit den 1980er-Jahren häufig auf, da sie regelmäßige Beiträge für eine Musikzeitschrift zu liefern beginnt. Doch die Welt der Männer ist nur die eine Hälfte des Pariser Kunstbetriebs, in Marion Kalters Œuvre stellt sie sogar den kleineren Teil dar.

Die feministische Emanzipation der 1970er-Jahre hat sich nachhaltig in ihre Arbeit eingeschrieben, davon zeugt nicht zuletzt auch die Fülle der Porträts, die sie Autorinnen, Künstlerinnen und Fotografinnen widmet. Beginnen wir mit den großen alten Damen der Moderne, die in Paris ihr Exil gefunden haben: Lotte Eisner, die „grande Dame” der Filmwissenschaft, liest 1983, im Jahre ihres Todes, noch für die Fotografin aus ihrem Buch Die dämonische Leinwand (S. 124), oder ein ganz frühes Bild von 1974 der Schriftstellerin Anaïs Nin, Autorin intimster Erlebnisse, mit unergründlichem Lächeln. Ein besonderes Bild gelingt ihr 1979, als sie in der Dependance der Pariser Galerie Zabriskie, ein weiterer Brückenkopf der amerikanischen Fotografie in Frankreich, die beiden Fotografinnen Berenice Abbott und Gisèle Freund zusammen ins Bild setzt (S. 126). Beide sind sich in der Zwischenkriegszeit in Paris wohl nie begegnet. Berenice Abbott verließ Paris am Ende der 1920er-Jahre und kehrte in die USA zurück. Gisèle Freund hingegen verließ Frankfurt und Nazi-Deutschland 1935, um sich in Paris niederzulassen und dort die Intellektuellen ihrer Zeit zu fotografieren und eine erste Sozialgeschichte der Fotografie zu schreiben. In Kalters Aufnahme sprechen die beiden nicht miteinander. Freund betrachtet aufmerksam die Fotografien an der Wand, Abbott sitzt da wie eine Sphinx, als lebendes Monument der Fotogeschichte.

Den Porträts der jüngeren Generation von Autorinnen und Künstlerinnen merkt man an, dass ihr Auftreten vor der Kamera kontrollierter ist, darauf bedacht, das richtige Bild von sich zu geben. Annette Messager posiert vor einer eigenen Arbeit zum Porträt, die eben jene Frage von Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung zum Thema hat (S. 137).

Die Essayistin Susan Sontag, Autorin von On Photography, erscheint mit eindrucksvoller Mähne und groß ins Bild gesetzt (S. 129). Das bereits erwähnte Porträt Chantal Akermans zeigt sie vor dem Plakat ihres Films Jeanne Dielman deren Protagonistin zu einer Ikone des radikaleren feministischen Ansatzes wird. Die großen Brillengläser der Künstlerin Joan Mitchell entsprechen wunderbar den Rückseiten der Rahmen (S. 122). Die aus Ägypten stammende Dichterin Joyce Mansour sitzt am Fenster, mit der Figur eines Vogels im Rücken, als wäre er ein Alter Ego der Autorin oder eine Hieroglyphe ihrer Identität (S. 132).

Die wohl schönsten Künstlerinnenporträts von Marion Kalter sind wieder szenische Porträts, aufgenommen in den Wohnungen und Ateliers ihrer Modelle. Die wunderbare, ebenso virtuose wie liebenswürdige Filmemacherin und Fotografin Agnès Varda sitzt noch im Bett, neben ihr ein 16-mm-Projektor, und doziert mit dem ihr eigen gewesenen Charme (S. 120). Oder bei Gina Pane, eine der Hauptvertreterinnen der Body Art, ist der Pose vor Kalters Kamera nicht abzulesen, dass zu der Radikalität ihrer Performances auch die Verletzung des eigenen Körpers gehörte, und dennoch zeigt die Großzügigkeit der ausgestreckten Arme, die Türflügel fest im Griff, dass der Körper ihr Ausdrucksmittel gewesen sein muss (S. 123).

In einem Gespräch hat sich Marion Kalter einmal zu ihrer Fotografie geäußert, sehr offen und direkt, wie es auch ihre Bilder sind. Zu einer Zeichnerin mit der Kamera, deren Aufnahmen stets perfekte Kompositionen gewesen wären, wie etwa jene von Henri Cartier-Bresson, zu dieser perfekten Geometrie-Künstlerin sei sie nie geworden. Für sie zählte stets die Teilhabe am Moment.

Fragt man nach den Früchten des langen Sommers der Fotografie, die Marion Kalter ernten konnte, so hat dies wirklich mit jener Zeugenschaft zu tun. Dabei geht es ihr oftmals nicht um einen Moment, sondern um verschiedene Zeitlichkeiten und mehrere Temporalitäten, die aus ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte ihrer Familie herrühren und der Geschichte einer Frau, die im Alter von 16 Jahren den Tod ihrer Mutter und ihrer Großmutter zu verarbeiten hatte.

Different Trains lautet der Titel von einer ihrer zuletzt entstandenen Serien (S. 171 ff.). Ihren Titel entleiht sie der Komposition von Steve Reich, die 1988 als Auftrag des Pariser IRCAM entstanden ist – einer dem Centre Pompidou angegliederten Institution, für welche Marion Kalter häufig arbeitete. Steve Reichs Komposition geht zurück auf seine vielen Reisen als Kind zwischen New York und Los Angeles in der ersten Hälfte der 1940er-Jahre. Zugreisen, die zeitgleich auf dem europäischen Boden der Shoah für ihn als Kind einer jüdischen Familie ganz anders ausgesehen hätten. Für Marion Kalter liegt die Analogie in der Flucht ihres Großonkels, ebenfalls aus einer jüdischen Familie, in Form einer Zugreise mit der Transsibirischen Eisenbahn durch die Sowjetunion des Jahres 1940. Marion Kalter unternimmt diese Reise auf etwa der gleichen Strecke 77 Jahre später, 2017, in einem Liegewagen von Moskau nach Beijing.

Florian Ebner

Ein besonderes Porträt ihres Vaters, deutscher Jude und naturalisierter Amerikaner, teilnehmender Advokat und Nebenkläger im Prozess um die IG-Farben, für die NATO arbeitender Jurist, zunächst in Frankreich und später in Deutschland, in Heidelberg, zeigt uns dessen Gesicht nicht, die Fotografie enthält es uns vielmehr vor, verborgen hinter der Maske von Groucho Marx, während er zugleich in seinem Büro sitzt, mit der Deutschlandkarte im Rücken – vielleicht ist auch dieses Bild eine Art Hieroglyphe einer Identität des 20. Jahrhunderts (S. 165).

Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen lautet der Titel einer wichtigen Ausstellung über Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik; vielleicht gilt dieser Satz auch für die Generation der 1970er-Jahre und in besonderer Weise für Marion Kalter. Für sie, deren Biografie zwischen Österreich, Deutschland, Frankreich und Amerika ihr viele Sprachen vermittelte, ist die Fotografie zu einer Art „Intimsprache“ geworden, wie sie es selbst einmal bezeichnet hat, die sie praktizierte, wenn sie sich selbst hinter der Kamera verbergen und doch zugleich an der Welt der Intellektuellen und Künstlerinnen partizipieren konnte. Nicht zuletzt ist die Kamera – eine Olympus, die sie in der Sequenz der Selbstporträts in Arles vor den Spiegel hält – zum Instrument der Erkundung ihrer eigenen Biografie geworden, von den frühen Selbstporträts auf der familiären Couch bis hin zuletzt zu den archäologischen Ausgrabungen auf dem elterlichen Dachboden … und dies ist eine weitere Serie, die es in diesem Buch zu entdecken gilt.

Arles, 1976: A young woman, age twenty-five, once a fine arts student, poses for the camera (p. 56). All but of the two of the sequence’s selected motifs feature a seemingly empty interior. She is always wearing the same clothes: a white, off-the-shoulder blouse and a flowered skirt. A chair helps her to take a wide variety of poses clasped hands resting in her lap; her body turning away from the camera, toward the window; one hand clinging to a door and the other clapped to her forehead; or even cowering behind the chair, looking at the camera through the bars on the chairback. Other pictures show her sitting on the ground, almost as if immersed in a dream, her eyes closed, arms and legs swaying in a slight blur. The doors play an important role; they stand open, giving structure to the pictorial space and conveying an impression of being unlived-in, as if this were an empty factory or a decommissioned school. In two photographs the young woman comes closer: this time she has the device in her hand and photographs herself in an old mirror in front of a white-tiled wall. As a kind of mise en abyme, the two mirror images are definitely a paradigm for a moment of self-examination. Is it the slightly clichéd quest for a role in life, or are these staged attempts to approach herself or to put herself at arm’s length merely exercises in photographic style, on a search for a good image?

Forty-five years later the woman in the photographs, Marion Kalter, says that the solo photo session in front of the camera was inspired by a discussion with the Magnum photographer David Hurn. Elsewhere, she recalls the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce,

1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was released in theaters that same year and whose director, Chantal Akerman, she photographed in front of a poster for her film (p. 119). As should be expected, Kalter is someone who understands the camera as an instrument of free expression, not only as regards the roles assigned to people in society, but also in opposition to the tight corset constricting art and painting in those years. Like so many other women artists in 1970s, Kalter also drew upon this apparatus.

While navigating through the images selected for this show, I inevitably think about the title of a book. Der lange Sommer der Theorie (literally, “the long summer of theory,” but translated into English as The Summer of Theory) is the name of a treatise by the historian Philipp Felsch on the history of the reception of the (mostly) French structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy and theory in Germany, as told through the history of the Merve publishing house1 in Berlin. It is not only the French intellectuals in Kalter’s photographs (Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss) who triggered this idea but also the many kinds of summer that can be discovered in Kalter’s pictures, which form the starting point for the question of whether there is also a “summer of photography.” If so, when does this summer begin, and when does it start for Marion Kalter?

Of course, there are the first warm days when the eightyear-old Marion experimented with a camera during a stay one summer with an English family on the Channel Island of Jersey (p. 158), or the twenty-three-yearold student, nude on the family sofa in one photo and clothed in another (p. 164). Perhaps the real summer began in 1974 when she met the beatnik jazz musician and poet Ted Joans and began what she called her “Teducation.” Joans, who was twenty-three years her elder, introduced his companion to a world that represented the spiritual, intellectual, and social liberation of the twentieth century. Perhaps for this twenty-four-year-old art student, now also a student of literature, the camera was the best means for her to participate in this artistic and intellectual world. Photographing Joyce Mansour, Régis Debray, and Gabriel García Márquez sitting on a crowded couch (p. 91); or Steven Taylor, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky loudly performing in the garden at the American Center in Paris (p. 83); a series of photos of James Baldwin and Ted Joans that speaks of the pure joy of reunion and cooperation. Or two wonderful, yet completely different pictures of William S. Burroughs: a landscape format from 1977 with Burroughs’s back to the camera, at a lone table under a bright spotlight in front of the yawning blackness of the space; or Burroughs six years later, this time photographed from the front, self-absorbed and almost more distant than in the previous picture (pp. 75-77).

Thanks to her “Teducation,” Kalter also had access to the music world, to jazz; she photographed the festival in Juan-les-Pins, Dizzy Gillespie on stage, and Charles

Mingus lighting a cigar at the bar. These photos still contain their initial magic and perhaps also the shyness of the young woman at the side of the experienced artist. She shot one of the most beautiful pictures during a visit with Ted Joans to Dorothea Tanning’s apartment, when she surprised another guest there with her camera. John Cage looks up briefly, embedded into the symmetrical composition of the image through the two spools of the tape recorder, the two headphone cushions, and the composer’s two hands. Kalter’s picture captures an intense gaze: the music is reserved exclusively for the composer (p. 145).

Ted Joans also arranged for her first job at one of the first galleries to dedicate itself to photography —in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when the cultural institutionalization of photography was in the making. The gallery was on the ground floor, a plate camera shop on the second floor, and the Magnum photo agency on the third floor. Since Marion Kalter spoke fluent English and German, she became a translator for the booming workshops at the still-young Les Rencontres internationales de la Photographie, a photography festival founded in Arles in 1969. It was at this moment, at the very latest, that the summer of photography began. Somewhat incredulously, with a little melancholy and almost a bit of envy, one looks at the lively activities in Kalter’s pictures of July days in 1975 and 1976 in Arles. Not only are they good photos, but they are also special documents of the now-legendary first photo workshop. The photos are almost reminiscent of Happenings, of public sit-ins, so great is the interest of the young people gathered there. For them, the small SLR cameras made by Nikon, Canon, or Olympus (Kalter holds just such a camera in front of her face in the above-mentioned mirror portraits) have become the new tools they can use to open up reality personally, poetically, or in a politically engaged manner. With cameras in their hands, around their necks, or next to them, the crowd of new photography disciples listens spellbound to Lucien Clergue, as he stands outdoors, preaching about photography. Ralph Gibson is in a small room, surrounded by at least two dozen workshop participants, giving a critique while holding a cigarette in his right hand and leafing through the contact sheets with the other: a moment of tense stillness, which allows Kalter enough time to capture the scene (p. 50). At the time Gibson was one of the key players in the transference of American photography to Europe, and picturesque Arles at midsummer was a major base camp. With his early 1970s’ series The Somnambulist Gibson came to epitomize a kind of photography that was enthusiastically received in Arles; his mix of magical realism and graphic elegance was inhaled and imitated by an entire generation. It was a form of photography, about which you could still say to the public, “Tell me what you want to say with the camera, and I’ll tell you how to compose it so that it will be a good picture.”

For the young Marion Kalter a translating, interpreting mouthpiece these experiences must have been formative, as she herself said, referring to the Magnum photographer David Hurn. Besides the discussions and seminars with Garry Winogrand and Guy Le Querrec (p. 51), or Verena von Gagern (a photographer whose work has fallen into some obscurity) at a table outdoors, surrounded by prints, there are also the workshops in action, at the moment the picture is taken, and one wonders about the tremendous energy released, as it is, for example, in the picture of Floris Neusüss inside a church choreographing a row of men before they become a living frieze in a life-sized, full-body photogram. The resemblance to Happenings continues in the workshops, where the ambitious amateur photographers are visiting Jean-Pierre Sudre at his home in Lacoste. Entirely in the liberating spirit of the nineteen-seventies, not only are the life-drawing workshop models naked, but so are the mostly male participants. The artistic relevance of some of these workshops is still debatable today. Kalter succeeds in capturing a wonderful, somewhat ironic picture of this: Sudre’s swimming pool also holds five photographers, including the two Magnum photographers David Hurn and Guy Le Querrec, along with Will McBride, swarming around two nude models (p. 53). At the time, the real art was probably not to allow any more of their colleagues with cameras into the picture, and yet at the same time to be somewhat reminiscent of Edward Weston in the arid southern French landscape.

Kalter’s portraits of Parisian intellectuals and artists of the late 1970s and 1980s lead us to the long summer of theory mentioned at the top of this essay. From the Parisian perspective, it was already late summer: the great anthropologist and structuralist, seventy-three-year-old Claude Levi-Strauss, casts a glance over his shoulder at the somewhat awed young photographer (p. 143). The two very different philosophers Emil Cioran and Emmanuel Levinas both intellectuals who came, like so many others, from Eastern Europe to Paris also sat for Kalter. Cioran, in his small attic apartment in the Latin Quarter, and Emmanuel Levinas, a little collapsed in his chair, in the same slanted position as all the publications that have found a place in the armchair next to him. Both look a little skeptical or thoughtful yet acquiesce to the photographer with her French-German/Austrian-American identity. The wonderful picture of Roland Barthes was taken in 1979, the year he finished Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Barthes takes no notice of the photographer. He is turned away from her, in profile, his gaze directed out the window or, more likely, inward (p. 144). One inevitably begins looking at Barthes’s portrait with his thoughts on photography in mind, such as the passage on the various temporalities at work when viewing Alexander Gardner’s portrait of the condemned, would-be assassin Lewis Payne : “…this will be and this has been.” 2

Do we already see in the philosopher’s averted gaze the death wish attributed to him by some of his companions in the last months of his life the man who, a few months after this picture was taken, would die as the result of an accident? Whether or not Barthes would have recognized himself in this photo, at the least the study of this picture certifies that we are dealing with a scholar at the window. What he would have appreciated about many of Kalter’s portraits is that they do not “overdetermine” the person portrayed, do not burden him with preconceived meaning and descriptive sense. Much is due to the fact that her images are the result of quick observations snapshots, or, in the language of music, “impromptus,” improvisations created out of the grace of the moment, deriving their charm from the simplicity of the gesture captured or the moment chosen.

The moment when Éric Rohmer briskly enters a classroom (p. 125), or Robert Wilson delves into his memories during a public lecture; when Luigi Nono reaches for the camera in a recording studio (p. 148), or Pierre Boulez rehearses in front of empty seats (p. 147): in general, the world of music has appeared frequently in Kalter’s pictures since the 1970s, when she began regularly contributing work to a music magazine. Yet the world of men is only half of the Parisian art world, and in Kalter’s oeuvre it is an even smaller share.

The women’s liberation movement of the 1970s left a lasting mark on Kalter’s work, as evidenced by more than just the wealth of portraits she devotes to women authors, artists, and photographers. Let us begin with the grand old ladies of modernism who found themselves exiled in Paris: Lotte Eisner, the grande dame of film studies, reads for the photographer from her book The Haunted Screen in 1983, the year of her death (p. 124); there is a very early picture, from 1974, of the writer Anaïs Nin, author of the most intimate experiences, with a fathomless smile. Kalter produced a special photo in 1979 when she shot portraits of the two photographers Berenice Abbott and Gisèle Freund together in the Paris branch of the Zabriskie Gallery, another bridgehead for American photography in France (p. 126). Neither of them would have met during the interwar period in Paris, as

Berenice Abbott left Paris in the late 1920s to return to the United States. Gisèle Freund, on the other hand, left Frankfurt and Nazi Germany in 1935 to settle in Paris, where she photographed the intellectuals of her time and wrote the first social history of photography. In Kalter’s photograph the two are not talking to each other. Freund carefully examines the photography on the wall, while Abbott sits there like a sphinx, a living monument to the history of photography.

In the portraits of the younger generation of authors and artists one notices that they appear to be in control in front of the camera, anxious to present the right image of themselves. Annette Messager poses for her portrait in front of a few of her own works, whose theme is the question of self-perception and the perception of others (p. 137). The writer Susan Sontag, author of the essay “On Photography,” with an impressive mane of hair, looms large in the image; the previously mentioned portrait of Chantal Akerman in front of the poster for her film Jeanne Dielman, whose protagonist became an icon of the radical feminist approach; the large eyeglasses of the artist Joan Mitchell correspond wonderfully to the reverse of the frame (p. 122). The Egyptian-born Joyce Mansour sits at the window, with the figure of a bird behind her, as if it were the author’s alter ego or a hieroglyph of her identity (p. 132). What may be Kalter’s most beautiful portraits of women artists are scenic portraits, taken in the apartments and studios of her models. The wonderful, amiable, virtuoso filmmaker and photographer Agnès Varda is still sitting in bed, next to a 16mm projector, lecturing with her own special charm (p. 120). Or Gina Pane, one of the major figures on the Body Art scene. The radicality of her performances, which also included injuring her own body, is not visible as she poses for Kalter’s camera, and yet the generosity of her outstretched arms, the doorknob firmly in her grip, show that her body must be her means of expression (p. 123).

In a conversation about her photography, Kalter once spoke very openly and directly about what is going on with her pictures. She never became a perfectly geometrical artist whose photographs were always meticulously composed, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example. What always counted for her was participating in the moment. If one asks Kalter about the fruits of the long summer of photography she was able to harvest, it really has to do with that kind of witnessing. She is often not concerned with a single moment but with various and sundry temporalities stemming from the examination of her family’s history and the story of a woman who, at the age of sixteen, had to face the deaths of her mother and grandmother. Different Trains is the title of one of her most recent series (pp. 171-175). Her title is taken from a Steve Reich composition commissioned in 1988 for the IRCAM in Paris, an institution that is part of the Centre Pompidou, for which Kalter often worked.

Steve Reich’s composition harks back to his many childhood trips between New York and Los Angeles in the early early 1940s train trips that would have looked very different to him if he had been the son of a Jewish family in the European land of the Shoah at the time. For Marion Kalter the analogy is the escape of her great-uncle, also from a Jewish family, on the TransSiberian Railroad through the Soviet Union in the year 1940. Kalter herself undertook this journey on approximately the same stretch around seventy-seven years later in 2017, in a couchette coach from Moscow to Beijing. A special portrait of her father a German Jew and naturalized American, an attorney and joint plaintiff in the IG-Farben trial, a jurist who worked for NATO, stationed first in France and later in Heidelberg, Germany shows us nothing of his face; rather, the photograph withholds it from us, hidden behind a Groucho Marx mask, as he sits in his office with a map of Germany behind him (p. 165). Perhaps this image is also a kind of hieroglyph of a twentieth-century identity.

Photography Means Participation is the title of an important exhibition on women photographers of the Weimar Republic; perhaps this phrase also applies to the 1970s’ generation and in a special way to Marion Kalter. For her, whose life in Austria, Germany, France, and America taught her many languages, photography has become a kind of “intimate language” as she herself once described it, which she practiced when she could hide behind the camera and yet at the same time participate in the world of intellectuals and artists. Last, but not least, the camera the Olympus she holds in the sequence of self-portraits taken in front of the mirror in Arles—has become a tool for exploring her own life, from the early self-portraits on the family sofa to, most recently, in her parents’ attic and this is another series waiting to be discovered in this book.

1 [Translated] Published in English as Phillip Felsch, The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion 1960-1990 trans. Tony Crawford (Cambridge/Medford: Polity Press 2022).1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang 1981), 96.

Diese Fotografie wurde am 1. Juni 1979 im Rahmen der Eröffnungsveranstaltung des ersten International Festival of Direct Poetry POLYPHONIX aufgenommen, welches im American Center, Boulevard Raspail 261, in Paris stattfand, an dessen Stelle heute die Fondation Cartier steht. Das American Center – nicht mit der Zweigstelle der amerikanischen Botschaft in der Rue du Dragon zu verwechseln – war eine für Gegenkultur und experimentelle Kunst offene private Institution. Schauplatz ist der Garten, während einer Pause bei der letzten Probe.

Die vier Personen sind (von links nach rechts):

Steven Taylor, ein junger Profimusiker – Sänger und Gitarrist –, den Ginsberg während des Jahrzehnts engagiert hatte, in dem er mit diesem Trio im Rahmen von Welttourneen in Konzertsälen, Uni-Hörsälen und/oder Aufnahmestudios auftrat.

Allen Ginsberg, der legendäre Autor von Howl (Das Geheul) und Kaddish (Kaddisch), zwei literarischen Meisterwerken, die viel zur Dynamisierung des poetischen Denkens in der zweiten Hälfte des 20 Jahrhunderts beigetragen haben.

Meine Wenigkeit (mit den neuen französischen Übersetzungen in der Hand) hinter Orlovsky.