If, whilst leafing through the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* today, a particular photograph really catches your eye, it will usually be captioned ‘Barbara Klemm Archive’. For thirty-five years, Barbara Klemm travelled the world on assignment for the FAZ, creating iconic photographs during that time: the meeting between Brezhnev and Willy Brandt, for example, which in 1973 set relations between East and West on a new course, or Helmut Kohl’s speech in Dresden in December 1989, which marked the end of the so-called ‘peaceful revolution’, accompanied by aggressively voiced demands for the supposedly salvific and swiftest possible integration of the East into the West, with its deceptive promises of consumerism. Some of these images are also on display at the Leonhardi Museum, but here – as in Klemm’s entire body of work – they serve merely to highlight certain aspects. The essence of this body of work was created during the photographer’s travels away from the newsworthy events before and immediately after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, when the long-awaited new era was devouring the normality that had prevailed until then. Barbara Klemm has approached this process with great sensitivity; the moments she has captured defy any single interpretation. A profound openness and curiosity towards the unfamiliar – which seems so far removed from one’s own life and yet represents merely another facet of human existence – are defining features of Klemm’s work. And in this, she encounters the unfamiliar with something that is so rarely taken for granted today: with affection.
