"I have been a person who perceives the world visually by nature. The less I practiced music, the more I was interested in painting, architecture, applied arts such as fashion and design. Had I lived about three centuries ago, I would have probably wandered round fairs with a magic lantern probably suggesting its improvement. In our technical age I am primarily interested in films. I shot my first documentary film in the early 1970s. Later I began thinking about fashion photography. I parted with cinema. However, one thing remained unchanged: my love to camera".
Gunter Sachs is a legendary personality, a constant fixture on the pages on popular magazines and newspapers, on our television. Gunter Sachs is also an accomplished mathematician, economist, futurologist, polyglot, documentalist, art historian and collector, bobsleigh record breaker and reckless motorcyclist.
In the mid 1950s Gunter Sachs started collecting works of modern art (new realists, informel, pop-art) in accordance with his own flair and taste. Today this collection is unique. For several years Gunter Sachs was the president of the Munich Museum of Modern Arts. In 1972 he opened a gallery in Hamburg and organised the first European exhibition of Andy Warhol.
Enchanted by cinema, early in life Sachs made documentary films being both a producer and a cameraman. He created six documentaries, which were highly appraised and awarded two top prizes at festivals in San Sebastian and Hyeres. In 1972 his Happening in White film won first prise of the World Olympic Committee in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Then Sachs concentrated on photography. "I have never studied photography. I just started making photos one day. And it has been going on for several decades".
Since 1975 Gunter Sachs has been working for fashion magazines including French and German Vogue. He also makes photos for exquisite aesthete art magazines and books. For a number of decades numerous photo albums were published including Madchen in meinen Augen, Lichtbilder, T’Surreale Erzahlungen und Photographien (which earned more than 1.4 Million Marks to the Mirja Sachs Foundation for children).
In 1991 he worked with Claudia Schiffer over a famous Heroines artistic series for six weeks. The world first night of the project took place in Kunsthalle in Bremen. Numerous international exhibitions followed. A knight and a romantic, Gunter Sachs managed to add extra facets to Claudia’s beauty, he made her sparkle with all the shades of female power and love magic.
Similarly to Cecil Beaton, David Bailie, Helmut Newton and Gilles Bensimon Gunter Sachs does not simply shoot fashion and celebrities. Through female beauty and fashion he shows his lively, subtle and nervous perception of the epoch, society and culture:
In 1995 Gunter Sachs started working with digital photos and computer compositions: "My thoughts were concentrated on coordination of the camera and the computer. Possibilities were unlimited. Everything became suddenly achievable: one tiger or hundreds, but it was this fullness that made everything difficult".
A catalogue for the exhibition has been published.
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