Volker Hinz
EinBlick

The third and final volume of the book trilogy dedicated to the early career of the Hamburg photographer Volker Hinz (1947-2019) will be published under the title EinBlick (meaning both “one view” and “insight”). The trilogy began in 2021 with the volume Hello Again and continued in 2023 with Carrousel, and presents his view of the world of politics, the social upheavals in the West German Republic, and the political minds in the last decades of the twentieth century, while also providing special, complementary insight into Hinz’s extensive photographic oeuvre. From the early seventies on, the great stern photographer accompanied all leading politicians on election campaigns, trips abroad, at conferences, major speeches—and, sometimes in surprisingly private circumstances, in their own homes. His pictures of personalities such as Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, as well as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev show his keen sense for the symbolic moment, for demonstrations of power, and crisis situations, not to mention the comic situations that often took place behind the scenes. Hinz had the good fortune to be a press photographer at a time when there was still an unwritten trust between politicians and journalists, so he was often able to take pictures that are astonishingly private from today’s perspective.
The portraits of politicians are complemented by selected reports from four eventful decades. At strangely amusing yet also frightening meetings of the KuKluxKlan or the bloody street battles of the Irish conflict, in the shower cubicles of the Ruhr miners or the meetings of East German civil rights activists after the fall of the Wall and the reunification: Volker Hinz and his cameras were there. The faces of the people he observed with great empathy reveal how decisions made by politicians change the lives of each individual.

The book’s publication will coincide with the exhibition at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which took over Volker Hinz’s photographic legacy in 2023.

Exhibition
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, October 23, 2024–February 2, 2025