Thursday, December 26, 2013

Philip Widmann and Karsten Krause


















The Photographer's Wife (2011), by Philip Widmann and Karsten Krause, celebrates the anonymous achievements of an amateur photographer, Eugen Gerbert, whose primary subject was his wife, Gerti. Now widowed, Gerti looks through boxes of photographs and recalls both faraway vacations and homey domesticity. The decades of seemingly commonplace marriage fly by; all the while, Eugen had meticulously photographed his beloved's body, dressed and undressed. Through a photographer's eyes, however, an ordinary woman becomes a goddess of femininity. Charmingly, Eugen's appreciation for his muse seems to have increased as she aged. Ultimately, Gerti's nakedness turns the pictures into aesthetic objects on the theme of womanhood. The photographer's notes and diaries, read aloud, have a deadpan quality, in contrast to the sensuality of the images.  
Creative Commons License
Documentary Starts Here by Nancy Kalow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.