Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation shows solo exhibition of Fred Koch's works

With  Fred Koch. Nature Photography of the 1920s and ‘30s, the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation in Berlin will present an extensive solo exhibition of around 100 works by photographer Fred Koch (1904-1947) from the 1920s to the 1930s from January 15 to April 24, 2022. His neo-objective photographs are in black and white and mostly depict detailed images of plants and crystals, but also show ice flowers, corals, conchylia, insects and X-ray photographs. They reveal the artist's passion for natural forms. This links him to the German photographer and documentary filmmaker Alfred Ehrhardt (1901-1984), who in turn took Koch's crystal photographs as his model. Thanks to extensive research and attribution by the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, the exhibition reveals many of Koch's works that had previously been forgotten because of his anonymous publications, his turn to press photography, and his early death as a prisoner of war.

Fred Koch, born in 1904, is considered one of the most important photographers of the Weimar Republic. In his photographs, he focused on emphasizing the beauty, grace and splendor of plants and made extensive use of the stylistic devices of neo-objective photography. Thus, he worked with light reflections as well as shadows and managed not only to dramatize his pictures through this targeted use of light, but also to alienate them in a surreal way or to abstract them through intense passages. In addition, he succeeded in making the aesthetic material qualities as well as the structure of crystals and minerals impressively visible with his photographs. For this purpose, he designed his own special cameras and studied illumination modalities.