The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg will be showing the exhibition Series of Portraits – A century of Photographs, a collection that will bring together 400 photos from 35 international artists. With the aim of offering the visitor different approaches to history and the portrait, the choice of works allows for an overall vision, and in a manner that shows the diverse stages of development of this type of photography. Special attention is given to the importance of the series, heiress to the first attempts in establishing typologies in comparing the subjects photographed.

The path began with daguerreotypes and calotypes of the XIX century, continuing with the shots of the People of the 20th Century by August Sander, those of Everyday Heads by Helmar Lerski and the portraits by Diane Arbus. People in a Lift by Heinrich Riebesehl plays witness to the spontaneity of uncomfortable passengers in an elevator, while Bernard Fuchs goes through the places of his own past in Oberösterreichische Menschen. The splendor revolves in the Florentine interiors of Patrick Faigenbaum, or the series by Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, in which he photographed his wife with her three sisters for 25 years, and 100 years of Hans-Peter Feldmann, with his 101 people from 1 to 100 years old, are just a few of the approaches that explore the subject of time.

Cindy Sherman is present with Bus Riders, variations on the “everyman” in public transportation, and Annie Leibovitz is as well with her Cindy Sherman (or better yet “Shermans”). Rebecca Horn shows Isabelle Huppert’s face in the series Portrait of an Image, a real catalogue of human emotions, while Andy Warhol doubles himself up as woman in the his Polaroid self-portraits. Lee Friedlander, Judith Joy Ross, Irving Penn, Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra, are just a few of the other names among the 35 who make up this exhibition.

Sebastián Messina

Series of Portraits – A century of Photographs
Until July 17th
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe
Steintorplatz
20099 Hamburg