Photography gradually came to be recognized as an independent art form in the 1980s. This period coincides with the major activity of Norbert Przybilla (1953–1996), whose estate is part of the photography collection at the Münchner Stadtmuseum. Przybilla, who also used the pseudonym anj norpsi, studied at the Bavarian State Institute of Photography in Munich between 1980 and 1982. Working both as an independent photographer and as a freelancer, he was primarily active in Munich and Regensburg, spending the final years of his life in Berlin. Przybilla explored artistic influences from Germany and the United States in his photographs and experimental video works. His activism is often tangible in his works, which reflect contemporary peace and antinuclear movements, along with the sexual emancipation of gay people and those living outside of heteronormative conventions. His works shaped the photo scene in Munich and the transformation of photography during this era.
Norbert Przybilla in the Collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum
Norbert Przybilla’s estate has been part of the photography collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum since 1999. It was donated by Dr. Martin Schwaiger, Przybilla’s longtime partner.[1] The holdings include approximately 36 archive boxes and 13 file folders. The majority of the collection stems from the artist’s student days and works from Przybilla’s extensive photo series Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung (Intermediate Images—Material in Movement) and Schwule Männer (Gay Men). The collection includes individual works and examples of applied photography, as well as ephemera and private material. In addition to video cassettes with artistic work, reportage, and documentary material, the estate also contains all of Przybilla’s negatives from the late 1970s to the 1990s. The holdings are catalogued in the museum’s database under the number FM-99/84, and a selection of works can be viewed in the Online Collection.
While most of the works are printed on gelatin paper, Przybilla also produced—especially in connection with his applied work—color photographs as well as several Cibachromes that are particularly notable due to the brilliance of their colors. Twenty-seven prints from the series Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung and Schwule Männer retain their original frames from the 1986 presentation in Munich at Galerie der Künstler, affiliated with the Association of Professional Visual Artists of Munich and Upper Bavaria, known as the BBK. With formats measuring up to 120 by 170 centimeters, they are quite large for the period. The tendency toward large-format images in photography, known as tableau form, had begun in the United States in the late 1970s and reached Germany in the 1980s.[2]
An exemplary selection of the estate holdings was presented in an exhibition at the Münchner Stadtmuseum in 2000. Shown concurrently with the exhibition Lehrjahre—Lichtjahre: Die Münchner Fotoschule 1900–2000 (Apprentice Years—Light Years: The Munich Photo School 1900–2000), which chronicled the school’s history with the work of its graduates, it focused on a single student from the school.[3] A catalog was published, titled Norbert Przybilla: Fotografien 1982–86, which remains the only monograph to date on the artist.[4] Its focus on the series Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung and Schwule Männer continues to influence the perception of the spectrum of themes and materials in Przybilla’s work. This essay aims to contextualize his work in both photography history and contemporary history, making it accessible to a larger audience.
Norbert Przybilla’s Path to Photography
Norbert Przybilla was born on May 17, 1953, in Vilsbiburg in Lower Bavaria. Although he initially studied German, social studies, and history at the University of Regensburg with the intention of becoming a teacher, his political activism, which was already apparent in his youth, prevented him from following this career after taking the qualifying examination.[5] Due to his membership in the Marxist student league Spartakus, which was considered unconstitutional at the time, he was barred from becoming a civil servant in 1979.[6]
During a subsequent visit to the United States, where he had contact with the local art and music scene in New York City, Przybilla decided to become a professional photographer. He applied to the Bavarian State Institute of Photography, where he studied between 1980 and 1982. The curriculum of the school, known as the Munich Photo School, focused on basic technical and aesthetic skills. In different master classes, the students received training in classical disciplines that would prepare them for vocational fields in applied photography[7] including architecture, landscape, portrait, fashion, advertising, and photo essays. Przybilla received particular support in his artistic development from Dieter Hinrichs (b. 1932), a photographer who became a teacher in 1981, who increasingly encouraged the students to create independent work.[8]
First Independent Work: Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung
In 1984 Przybilla presented Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung (Intermediate Images—Material in Movement), his first independent artistic work, a series of abstracted street scenes in Munich, which he had begun in 1982 while still a student. He created deliberately blurry views of fast-paced city life by shooting a large-format camera from the hip and holding the shutter too long to overexpose the shot. Przybilla’s intention was to capture fleeting moments that humans only subconsciously perceived, creating pictures that the brain would combine into focused images.[9] The purposeful handling of abstracting processes such as long exposures take up concepts of modernist artists, beginning with Futurism in the 1910s and the blur experiments of the German photography group fotoform in the 1950s.[10]
Portrait Studio and the Photo Series "Schwule Männer"
Following his training as a photographer, Przybilla took jobs in industry and advertising, and also worked as a portrait photographer. He ran his own studio at Nymphenburger Strasse 156a in Munich until the late 1980s. It was there, starting in 1985, that he created his artistic project Schwule Männer (Gay Men). For this project, he invited homosexual acquaintances and people he had approached in gay bars to pose as they wished against a neutral background. Przybilla was especially interested in spontaneous gestures that expressed the personalities of the people depicted. In the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that intensified the social defamation of gays, this can be seen as an attempt to support the sexual emancipation of homosexuals.[11] On the artistic classification of this project, see the essay Norbert Przybilla’s Series Schwule Männer and Queer Photography.
From Photography to Video
A second sojourn in New York in 1983 had far-reaching consequences for Norbert Przybilla. Although he suffered an injury to his lower spine after falling from a window, adversely affecting his health for the rest of his life, he was also inspired there by his contact with New York–based German artist Dieter Froese (1937–2006), who is known for his experimental installations of video art.[12] While Przybilla had already created his first video work, titled Wir wollen leben (We Want to Live), in 1983,[13] he intensified his video-based work starting in 1987, putting photography on the back burner. His video work Streng verboten—fast gestattet (Strictly Forbidden—Almost Permitted) depicts a drive from Munich to Berlin on the German autobahn without any cuts, which Przybilla overlays with atmospheric music to achieve a hypnotic effect.
Norbert Przybilla, Streng verboten – fast gestattet (strictly forbidden—almost permissed), 1988 / Einstein on the Autobahns, 1988 (excerpts), digital from VHS-cassette, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Photography Collection, inv. no. FM-99/84.7.1/ FM-99/87.7.2, © Münchner Stadtmuseum, Photography Collection, Estate Norbert Przybilla
In 1992 Przybilla moved to Berlin, where he hoped to realign his art and intensify his video work. He was no longer able to do so. His concept papers and negatives in the estate indicate that many of his projects remained incomplete. In 1996 Przybilla died of lung cancer in Berlin at the age of forty-three.
Exhibitions and Collections
Przybilla’s work was primarily exhibited in Munich and Regensburg. He participated in his first group show in 1984 at the Galerie der Künstler of the BBK in Munich, where he presented his project Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung (Intermediate Images—Material in Movement). In 1981 the artist-run gallery began to purposefully give young artists the chance to exhibit and sell their works.[14] München ’84 was the gallery’s first exhibition to feature only photography.[15] Filmmaker and curator Harald Rumpf (*1955) cautiously described this as a “shimmer of hope” building on “developments of the past two years in Munich’s photography scene.”[16]
The series Zwischenbilder—Materie in Bewegung had an even greater visibility. In 1985 it was shown at the Triennale internationale de la photographie in Fribourg, Switzerland, and in 1986, along with several other works by other artists, it represented the field of photography in the exhibition Bayerische Kunst unserer Tage (Bavarian Art of Our Time) in Budapest, initiated by the Munich Department of Culture. That same year, the only acquisition by an institution during Przybilla’s lifetime occurred: the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus bought two works from this series.[17] The fact that Schwule Männer (Gay Men) was shown at venues in the queer community in Munich and Regensburg explains why its existence was known only to a smaller circle. For more on this, see the essay Publication and Reception of Norbert Przybilla’s Schwule Männer Series. Although Przybilla showed his video works in 1988 and 1989 in Munich (Galerie der Künstler) and Regensburg (Galerie Quasar), they received little attention. It is not known if there were any exhibitions after he moved to Berlin.
One of Munich’s venues for photography exhibitions that should be mentioned in this context is the basement gallery run by Dieter Hinrichs, a teacher at the Munich Photo School who provided a space for his students to exhibit their work at the school.[18] Among the private galleries that specialized in photography, Zango—Galerie und Fotoladen and Galerie Lange-Irschl were unable to survive in spite of the fact that they had some “big names” in their rosters of artists.[19] Photography was gaining public support, far from the beaten track of the Fotomuseum at the Münchner Stadmuseum, especially through Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, head of the Neue Sammlung—Staatliches Museum für angewandte Kunst, and through the photography prize of the city of Munich that has been awarded every years since 1984.
Contextualization in the Photography Collection
As a Bavarian artist, Norbert Przybilla expanded the regional context of the 1980s in the Photography Collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum. He is a graduate of the famous Munich Photo School, like many other photographers in the collection including landscape photographer Lotte Eckener (1906–1996) and commercial and portrait photographer Juergen Teller (b. 1964), who, several years after Przybilla, also studied with Dieter Hinrichs. Przybilla’s fashion and commercial pictures have parallels in the collection, such as the oeuvre of Regina Relang (1906–1989). The portraits and nudes from the series Schwule Männer (Gay Men) can be seen within the tradition of the images of the body, which the holdings of the Photography Collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum extensively trace, both in terms of prints and catalogs from the museum’s specialized library. Included among the representations of men are the works of Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931) and Guglielmo Plüschow (1852–1930), whose nudes of young men imitating works of classical antiquity gained currency in the homosexual movement in the early twentieth century.[20] Herbert List (1903–1975), too, whose estate is part of the collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, focused on staging the sensuous qualities of the male body.[21] Juxtaposed with works by Gloeden and List, Przybilla’s male nudes display a new perception of self, highlighting gay love and desire in a more confidence and personal way than had been possible in earlier decades.
One of Przybilla’s contemporaries was photographer Michael Janiszewski (1957–2019), who was also based in Munich and also explored queer identities in the 1990s. Unlike Przybilla, Janiszewski stages his arrangement of models or dolls and props. In doing so, he humorously plays off contradictory codings of gender stereotypes against each other in order to disrupt conventional viewing habits.[22] An extensive lot of works by Janiszewski was donated to the Photography Collection in 2020.
The Münchner Stadtmuseum has presented Przybilla’s oeuvre with a focus on his transformation of the image of men in the 1980s, including in the exhibition Nude Visions in 2009 or most recently in 2023 in the exhibition (K)ein Puppenheim ([Not] a Dollhouse), in which works from the series Schwule Männer represent queer city life in Munich. In contrast to the period in which it was created, the series is now accessible to a wide audience, and Przybilla is read as a queer photographer. This proves that as archives, museum holdings are always in flux and influenced by context, interpretation, and current issues. This reflection on the collection’s dynamics will be continued in the essay Publication and Reception of Norbert Przybilla’s Schwule Männer Series.
Endnotes
[1] See Ulrich Pohlmann, “Der Tod ist nur die Fortsetzung des Lebens mit anderen Mitteln,” in Pohlmann, ed., Norbert Przybilla: Fotografien 1982–86 (Munich: Fotomuseum im Münchner Stadtmuseum, 2000), 5.
[2] Jean-François Chevrier, “Die Abenteuer der Tableau-Form in der Geschichte der Fotografie,” in Chevrier, ed., Photo-Kunst: Arbeiten aus 150 Jahren (Mannheim: Kunsthalle Mannheim; Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1989), 9–45.
[3] For the exhibition chronicle of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, see https://www.muenchner-stadtmuseum.de/archiv (accessed on September 25, 2024).
[4] Pohlmann, Norbert Przybilla: Fotografien 1982–86.
[5] See Martin Schwaiger, “Norbert Przybilla: 17.5.1953–21.8.1996,” in Pohlmann, Norbert Przybilla, 6–7.
[6] See “Je eine Erklärung der betroffenen GEW-Mitglieder und des GEW-LA vom 14.11.1981,” https://www.gew-bayern.de/berufsverbote/je-eine-erklaerung-der-betroffenen-gew-mitglieder-und-des-gew-la-vom-14111981 (accessed on September 25, 2024).
[7] Rudolf Scheutle, “Gehen wir daran, diese traurigen Zustände zu verbessern!”: Zur Geschichte der Münchner Fotoschule,” in Ulrich Pohlmann and Rudolf Scheutle, eds., Lehrjahre—Lichtjahre: Die Münchner Fotoschule 1900–2000 (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum; Schirmer/Mosel, 2000), 17–57.
[8] Scheutle, “Gehen wir daran, diese traurigen Zustände zu verbessern!,” 56–57; and Dieter Hinrichs, “Die Durchdringung des Schleiers,” in Pohlmann, Norbert Przybilla, 8–9.
[9] Norbert Przybilla, concept paper, “Projekt: Zwischenbilder: Materie in Bewegung,” 1985, Photography Collection, Münchner Stadtmuseums, Norbert Przybilla Estate.
[10] Wolfgang Ullrich, Die Geschichte der Unschärfe (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2009) (2002), S. 109.
[11] See Magdalena Beljan, “Aids-Geschichte als Gefühlsgeschichte,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, November 6, 2015, https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/214863/aids-geschichte-als-gefuehlsgeschichte/ (accessed on September 25, 2024).
[12] On Froese’s work see, for example, Dieter Froese: Unpräzise Angaben—not a model for big brother’s spy cycle (Bonn: Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1987).
[13] Wir wollen leben (We Want to Live) documents the human chain between Stuttgart and Neu-Ulm that was formed to protest the American nuclear intermediate-range missiles stationed in Germany. As shown by a copy of a letter in the holdings of the estate, Przybilla offered this material to Michael Myerson for publication. Myerson was chairman of the American Peace Council whom he met on his trip to the United States. See Norbert Przybilla, duplicate of letter to Michael Myerson, 1983, photography collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Norbert Przybilla Estate. On the history of the protest, see Beate Storz, Die lange Kette: Die Friedensbewegung Neu-Ulm im Herbst 1983, vol. 16 (Neu-Ulm: Dokumentationen des Stadtarchivs, 2023).
[14] Examples include is the exhibition formats Debütant*innen (Debutants) and Erste Jahre der Professionalität (First Years of Professionality), which continue to be held today. See the gallery’s chronicle and archive, https://bbk-muc-obb.de/galerie-der-kuenstler/ueber-die-galerie/ (accessed on September 25, 2024). In 1988 Przybilla was represented in the seventh edition of Erste Jahre der Professionalität.
[15] Rolf Liese, “Anmerkung,” in München ’84, ed. Bundesverband Bildender Künstler, München und Oberbayern e.V. (Munich: Galerie der Künstler, 1984), 5.
[16] Harald Rumpf, “Vorwort,” in München ’84, 7–8.
[17] See Lenbachhaus website, https://www.lenbachhaus.de/digital/sammlung-online/person/przybilla-norbert-9052 (accessed September 25, 2024).
[18] Scheutle, “Gehen wir daran, diese traurigen Zustände zu verbessern!,” 55.
[19] On Galerie Zango, see Rudolf Scheutle, “Archivgeschichten XVIII: Von Zango ins Westend; Ein erster Blick auf einen schlummernden Archivbestand einer Münchner Fotogalerie aus den 1980er-Jahren,” Photonews 26, no. 2 (2024): 26. On Galerie Lange-Irschl, see the archive material in the Stadtarchiv, Munich:46632 Band I, Kulturelle Aktivitäten, Bildende Kunst, Private Galerien, Sammlungen, Photogalerie Lange-Irschl.
[20] See Ulrich Pohlmann, “Wilhelm von Gloedens sizilianisches Arkadien,” in Meister der Kamera—Wilhelm von Gloeden: Taormina (Munich, Paris, and London: Schirmer/Mosel, 1998), 5–25; and Pohlmann, Taormina: Photographien von Wilhelm von Gloeden (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, forthcoming).
[21] See Esther Ruelfs, Den Körper aktivieren: Verlebendigung und Mortifikation bei Herbert List (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016).
[22] Heinz Schütz, “nun bricht zusammen, was zusammen gehört”: Über die Fotoinszenierungen von Michael Janiszewski,” in Michael Janiszewski: Fotoarbeiten 1990–1999 (Graz: Edition Camera Austria, 2000), 3–8.
Image credits for selected objects
[1] Herbert List, Junger Araber mit Steppenkerzen, Hammamet (young arab with desert candles, Hammamet), 1935, gelatine silver print, 29,7 x 22,5 cm (image), Münchner Stadtmuseum, Photography Collection, inv. no. FM-2000/710.J-TU-HAM-001A, © Herbert List & Max Scheler Estate, Hamburg Germany
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