Andreas Fux. стыд и красота

About

The man leans in a doorway high up on a building in Berlin. With his white trousers, white shoes, no shirt, a chain around his neck, he embodies youth in contrast to the lined, scabby buildings that have waited half a century for renovation. They represent stasis, while the young man looks towards a future we cannot yet see.
Today we can look back and look at the scenario with different eyes. The seeming stasis from the time has something forgiving and wistful about it in light of that future, which thirty years later is also in the past, and bought with it the once longed-for renovation that changed everything. The picture represented the attitude of a new generation – now it is historical.
The path from this photograph to Andreas Fux’s current studio pictures is a long but consistent one. He has preserved the almost tender and respectful handling of his subjects but the shy approach has given way to one that could be described as calculated ecstasy.
The sessions in which he bathes his models in soft light take an entire night, are meticulously planned, take place in a highly sensitised atmosphere, following a dramatic plan in which surprises are written in, even if the photographer also tries to capture reality in the pictures he considers.

“I’m not really a believer, but these meetings have something sacred about them that is beyond religion.” It sounds a little solemn when Andreas Fux talks in these terms about the encounters he anticipates somewhat nervously but in truth it is the most precise way of describing what takes place. He releases the people from their environment, ‘exposes’ them and is anxious to set aside not just the space but also the time for them.

Fux often accompanies his models for years as they change in front of his lens, growing older and incidentally presenting new tattoos. Incidentally because usually much more is happening than simple the depiction of a status quo. The photographs are the outcomes of performances that seek not just to transport images, but feelings as well, taking a step from staging and overstepping the staging – from show to feverish hallucination. Their power lies in the supposed contradiction between the cool surface and the requirement of the model to break through it, to discover themselves between intoxication and narcissism.
During the period of the photograph of the young man in front of the crumbling façades of East Berlin, Andreas Fux was also in Moscow. This is where he took the pictures for his first publication ‘Die Russen kommen’ (The Russians are Coming). At the time, in the Gorbachev era it looked for a moment as if there could be an enlightened future there in which a diversity of thoughts and feelings would be possible.
During the period of the photograph of the young man in front of the crumbling façades of East Berlin, Andreas Fux was also in Moscow. This is where he took the pictures for his first publication ‘Die Russen kommen’ (The Russians are Coming). At the time, in the Gorbachev era it looked for a moment as if there could be an enlightened future there in which a diversity of thoughts and feelings would be possible.
The fact that the photographer had to secretly smuggle his pictures into the country for the exhibition ‘стыд и красота’ in Moscow in September 2015 makes it clear that things turned out differently. In some respects, he is reminded of the conditions in the GDR in the late 1980s where it was only possible to work freely if you bypassed all official channels. While the photographer himself travelled from Berlin to Russia, the photographs had to be sent to Moscow via Zurich, like smuggled goods. They could be read as propaganda for a different way of being and you could get the impression that the current Russian system has nothing more to fear other than being different.
In the end, it was not as the artist feared, the Russian security agency who nearly put a stop to the exhibition, but Martin, the host’s dog who pissed on the pictures in the night before hanging the show. A nice little anecdote which can only be told because the Moscow exhibition could not take place in the public space of a gallery but in the protected – because they are private – rooms of a friend.
When Andreas Fux shows his work in Berlin now, the conditions are much less explosive. It may seem less subversive and courageous because here an artist has the freedom to exhibit and make being different visible. And we spectators have the freedom to classify the images as we choose because Andreas Fux’s work is free of any didactic impetus. And yet the photographs bring their own histories with them. They challenge us to take a position which in the end is also a political one. While western tolerance is threadbare, Russian intolerance is disgusting. One must not adjust oneself to repression, wherever it happens.

 by Boris von Brauchitsch