About the Work
Barbara Klemm's photographs are not staged. While the attention of the visitors to the Musée du Louvre is focused on a work which we cannot see, Eugène Delacroix's 1830 masterpiece 'Liberty Leading the People' hangs virtually unnoticed in the background. Nonetheless, the arm movement of the man in the foreground seems to take up the very gesture of the allegorical female figure in the centre of the painting. In her photographs Klemm seeks a close dialogue between the viewer and the art on display. Her carefully composed pictorial details characterise people in their relationship to the social structure of their surroundings. As a press photographer for the 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung', Barbara Klemm became a chronicler of the German Federal Republic. She always produced her photographs in multilayered black and white.
