Photography | Aenne Biermann: Tell the story from the end

Aenne Biermann, self-portrait with a silver bullet, 1931. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Some stories have to be told from behind, from their sad ending, based on the traces that you find in the present when you look for them. The photographer Heidi Specker was looking for traces of another photographer, a woman who died in January 1933 at the age of just 34: Aenne Biermann. In the history of photography she is referred to as a representative of a new way of seeing, an aesthetic direction of the late Weimar Republic. What is characteristic of the New Vision is the exhaustion of all the technical innovations that existed in photography in the late 1920s. Their representatives experimented with perspective and depth of field. The style can be found in artistic photography, but rather in the advertising design of those years.

Biermann started out as an amateur, taught herself how to use the technology, and received state-of-the-art lenses from the Zeiss company, with which her husband, the department store owner Herbert Biermann, had good contacts. The photographer with the short haircut set up her laboratory in the ladies' room of the modernist Wilhelminian style villa that she lived in with her family in Gera. “Women’s Room, Men’s Cut” is therefore also the title of Specker’s exhibition. The results of Specker's artistic research can now be seen in the old building of the Leipzig Gallery for Contemporary Art (GfzK). They are images and arrangements that result from a search for clues that concern Biermann's life and work, but also her family's escape from the Nazis from 1939 onwards.

Heidi Specker tells the story of the photographer Aenne Biermann from the end, from her current traces, by registering what of her work has survived and what has been lost. To do this, she researched Biermann's hometown of Gera, visited her grandson in Vienna and traveled to Trieste, where traces of her archive were lost in 1939. After her untimely death, she left behind more than 3,400 labeled and numbered negatives of various sizes, most of them on glass.

After the Nazis came to power, the Jewish Biermann family fled to the British Mandate of Palestine. Their possessions, including the photo archive, were packed into two heavy wooden containers. They should follow the family to Haifa. After the outbreak of war, the cargo remained in the port of Trieste. It was later looted by the Nazis and is now considered lost. Only 400 hand prints of her work have survived. Larger holdings of her pictures are in the Bavarian State Painting Collection and in the Folkwang Museum in Essen.

Heidi Specker tells the story of the photographer Aenne Biermann from the end, from her current traces, by registering what of her work has survived and what has been lost.

Typical of Biermann's photographs are their everyday motifs, which, however, become completely unusual thanks to the formal means. Biermann photographed a bag full of walnuts in such a way that the folds in the paper and the grooves in the nut shells became three-dimensional. Heidi Specker added her own photo, which shows a bouquet of dahlias, their heads sticking out of the paper like the nuts, in color instead of in sepia. This is a formal attempt to link Biermann's work to the present. The pair of images is part of Specker's series “Amnesia Gera I-XVI”. She takes photographs of Biermann's photographs and places them as historical objects in her, our, present. They are handled with protective gloves, lie on tissue paper covers and reflect the daylight.

There is little in Gera that reminds us of the famous photographer. In the exhibition you can find a photo of the place where the villa stood, as well as the back of her gravestone. On the one hand, Specker points out empty spaces, but on the other hand, they are also placeholders - for the presence in urban space that Biermann is not granted, for a work that no longer exists in its breadth.

In the spring, Heidi Specker met the photographer's grandson, Zvivka Biermann, in Vienna. She hoped to take some photos of photographs that were in the family's possession. Possibly stored in a safe or privately on a chest of drawers in an old Viennese apartment. But the photos were loaned for an exhibition in Israel. His sister, Elda Goldacki Biermann, still lives in Tel Aviv. In Vienna, Specker then took photos of old carpets, furniture and cutlery in a Caritas social department store, in the Museum of Applied Arts and in the Dorotheum auction house, which she assembled into a film. “Vienna Vienna,” as it is titled, shows us the places where stolen Jewish property all too often disappeared.

At Christmas 2024, Specker traveled to Trieste, where the Biermanns' cargo boxes were missing. Specker photographed the seashore from where the boxes were supposed to have been shipped to Haifa. Then again a small series of objects in the window displays: crystal vessels, a box from Gucci. The series of pictures that Specker took on her forays through Gera, Vienna and Trieste appear lost and a little melancholic. What you are looking for seems forever undiscoverable. What is found should help to reconstruct the story. It's helpful and sometimes it's not. This tension is one of the greatest strengths of Specker's photographic series in the old GfzK building.

The exhibition also includes some fixtures, chairs and jackets. A contribution from the fashion and design label Bless, which Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag run together. Using handrails and wooden borders, they create spiral shapes, nesting the historicist spaces. It is a reminiscence of the Biermanns' home that was demolished. The historicist villa in Gera, with its modern interior. A brick-patterned blanket hangs over one chair and a heavy fur coat over another. This is where the exhibition becomes enigmatic, almost a little crazy. The story could have been completely different.

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