About the exhibition

Hardly any photographer got so close to the politicians of his time as Volker Hinz (1947 – 2019) did. Starting at the beginning of the 1970s, the stern photographer accompanied them during election campaigns, journeys abroad, conferences, major speeches – and sometimes also up to their private homes. His eye for depicting personalities, such as Willy Brandt or Deng Hsiao Ping, Helmut Kohl or Joschka Fischer, followed his keen sense for the key moment or symbolic moment, enthralling relationships, power and powerlessness, tragedy, but also comedy, in public and behind the scenes. "Hinz-close" was the word that Hinz, who was based in Hamburg, used himself. In his portraits of politicians, human facets appear which remain hidden in media productions in front of TV cameras. These pictures always reflect also the relationship between the media and politics.

The exhibition "EinBlick" – insight – provides a view of the photo archive of Volker Hinz taken over by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in 2021. Besides the portraits, selected photo stories invite visitors to reflect on four politically eventful decades – and their implications for the present. At the processions of the Ku Klux Klan or the street fights of the Ireland conflict, in the showers of the miners in the Ruhr region or the meetings of the east-German citizens’ rights activists after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification events: Volker Hinz was there. In the faces of the people, viewed by him with great empathy, it becomes visible how the politicians’ decisions change the life of the individual.

Information overview