If you really get stuck on a picture when leafing through the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung today, it usually says "Archiv Barbara Klemm" underneath. For thirty-five years, Barbara Klemm travelled on behalf of the FAZ and created photographic icons during this time: The meeting between Brezhnev and Willy Brandt, for example, which set the relationship between West and East on a new course in 1973, or Helmut Kohl's Dresden speech in December 1989, which marked the end of the so-called peaceful revolution, accompanied by aggressively presented demands for the East to join the West, supposedly bringing salvation and as quickly as possible, with its deceptive promises of consumerism. Some of these pictures can also be seen in the Leonhardi Museum, but here - as in Klemm's entire oeuvre - they only set accents. The essence of this work was created during the photographer's travels away from the newsworthy events before and immediately after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, when the longed-for new era devoured the normality that had prevailed until then. Barbara Klemm approached this process very cautiously; the moments she captured refuse to be unambiguous. Klemm's work is characterised by a great openness and curiosity towards the foreign, which is seemingly so far removed from her own life and yet represents just another facet of human life. And in it, she encounters this stranger with something that is so rarely taken for granted today: affection.
