Leap in Time. Salomon / Klemm

Erich Salomon was a celebrity photographer and also portrayed himself as such. He worked with guile and a hidden camera to capture, as the title of his book put it, “Famous Contemporaries at Unguarded Moments”. His methods anticipated those used by today’s paparazzi, but his images do not speak the sensationalist language of revelation. They show the ways of the political and social elite of his time, well before the advent of media advisors, and they show the daily business of politics rather than its staged management. Erich Salomon was himself a gentleman who photographed other gentlemen. As a photojournalist, he investigated the hitherto unknown world of parliamentary business for newspaper readers. His fame gave him access to the highest echelons of power – and the living rooms of film and music stars as well as celebrities from the world of literature and art. The menacing presence of the Nazis in parliament in Berlin from 30 October 1930 spelled the end of this culture, which was also reflected in Erich Salomon’s photographic vision. In 1932 he produced his only socio-political reportage, entitled “The Prisoners of the World Crisis”. It is like a grim foreboding of things to come.
Many photographs by Barbara Klemm are now etched in the collective visual memory of the Germans, but we are not always aware that these pictures were first made as photojournalism. Like Salomon, Barbara Klemm does not stage her photos in any way, although she does not go so far as to use a hidden camera. Her pictures are based on her precise knowledge of her subject, which she condenses into a universally valid message.