Photo exhibition in the Festsaal-Foyer of the Freiheitshalle Hof

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla and Michael Ballhaus are the focus of the exhibition. The photos are half a century old. What makes them so interesting for us today? First of all, of course, there is the quality of Michael Friedel's photographs. But the selection for Hof starts somewhere else. It's about the connection to cinema. Fassbinder was of course also at the Hof International Film Festival. Like the other personalities of New German Cinema, he was not to be missed, although he is remembered more for anecdotes such as being thrown out of the hotel. He is probably the best-known German director in the world and continues to shape film aesthetics to this day.

There was a very close-knit group of artists around Fassbinder who became style-defining in theater and film and who stood for the awakening of a young scene in the 1960s and into the 1980s. The actress Hanna Schygulla is still the face that film fans associate with it today. Michael Friedel portrayed her, as well as Fassbinder, both in the working environment and in private moments. He gets close to them in his fots, very close. Few in the industry have achieved this so masterfully. Munich, Feldkirchen, Rome - are the background. We see the real thing in the faces.

Today, no movie or series can do without them. Without the 360-degree tracking shot around the main character or couple. Often with counter-rotation or zoom and increasing speed. The invention goes back to Claude Lelouch, but Michael Ballhaus turned it into an aesthetic experience. Michael Friedel photographed him in Rome during the filming of "Martha". A document of film history - and a good photo anyway.

Everyone knows photos by Michael Friedel. Be it the Elvis portrait from 1956 on the cover of "Der Spiegel" magazine. Or the countless photos that have been published in magazines such as "Paris-Match", "Stern", "Quick", "Life" or "twen". He is one of the great photographers of the Federal Republic of Germany, but traveled worldwide. His reportages were style-defining, both in terms of the places that became tourist dream destinations thanks to his pictures, as well as his documentation of the lost cultures of indigenous peoples. Thematic focal points repeatedly became a working program for him over longer periods of time, with always convincing results at the cutting edge. Most recently, his photographs were shown in the major Fassbinder retrospective at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn.