Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Explained

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Birth Place:Berlin, Germany
Occupation:Photographer
Known For:Conceptual photography

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (born 1938) is a German conceptual photographer and artist who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her photographs follow a minimalist aesthetic and incorporate documentary and conceptual approaches. She is best known for her serial photographs of historical architecture in Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

Early life and education

Schulz-Dornburg was born in Berlin in 1938. In 1958, she moved to Munich where she studied ethnology at the University of Munich. In 1959, she switched to studying photojournalism at the Institut für Bildjournalismus in Munich where she remained a student until its closure in 1960 due to the death of its founder Hans Schreiner.[1]

Work

Schulz-Dornburg began photographing as a teenager when she experimented with her uncle's large-format glass-plate camera.[2] In 1967, she lived in New York City where she became acquainted with land art and conceptual art, and she continued following these art movements upon her return to Germany. The early encounter with artists such as Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, and Walter De Maria[3] [4] had a lasting effect on Schulz-Dornburg's conceptual approach to photography throughout her career.

After returning to Germany, Schulz-Dornburg engaged in social work primarily with drug addicts, using photography as a therapeutic device. In 1969, she photographed adventure playgrounds in Amsterdam leading to her first photo series published in Abenteuerspielplätze: ein Plädoyer für wilde Spiele.[5] This publication marked the first of many book projects centered around Schulz-Dornburg's photography.

Schulz-Dornburg's early photographic work originated from various international journeys often to regions not easily accessible to foreign travelers, which established a pattern for her future work. Her second book project documenting the curtains at the Piazza San Marco in Venice, realized in collaboration with the architect Katharina Sattler, reveals the influence of Ed Ruscha's seminal photobook Every Building on Sunset Strip.[6] Other series from Schulz-Dornburg's 1970s oeuvre were shot in Burma, England, China, and Turkey. Schulz-Dornburg's 1980 travels through Iraq, which resulted, among others, in a photo series on the Marsh Arabs, marked an important point in Schulz-Dornburg's career. Her photographs document the environment of the Mesopotamian Marshes and the culture of their inhabitants shortly before the draining of the marshes ordered by Saddam Hussein and the ensuing destruction of this ecosystem and cultural landscape. This interest in environmental issues continued on in other series such as Ewiger Weizen, which documents the biodiversity of wheat species and its decline in the wake of industrial monoculture farming through serial photographs of over one hundred unique wheat ears and seeds. Marking her longest project, which began in 1985 and ended in 1994 with the permission to photograph the Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg, Ewiger Weizen formed part of the exhibition "zur nachahmung empfohlen! expeditionen in ästhetik & nachhaltigkeit"[7] and traveled with it around the world for over 10 years since 2010. It has gained renewed relevance on the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Schulz-Dornburg first achieved international recognition with the series Sonnenstand, which documents hermitages along the Spanish section of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Dismayed by the destruction brought about by the First Gulf War, she sought to turn to a time and place of a harmonious coexistence and reciprocal inspiration of different cultures. For Schulz-Dornburg, the Mozarabic architecture of 10th- and 11th-century hermitages along the Camino encapsulated this transcultural perspective. The series' focus on the movement of light captured through the windows of the chapels' apse clearly delineated Schulz-Dornburg's conceptual style and her creation of meaning through the use of the interplay between light and darkness.[8] [9]

In the later years of her career, Schulz-Dornburg traveled several times to Armenia, Russia, and Syria, as well as to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia, among other locations. The journeys to Armenia resulted in multiple series, including her best-known project Transitorte, which shows Soviet-era bus stops in Armenia. Other notable series include views of the ancient city of Palmyra before its partial destruction by ISIS, of Mount Ararat captured from Armenia across the border to Turkey, of abstract monumental sculptures in Kronstadt, and of abandoned architecture of the Hejaz railway in Saudi Arabia, among others. Her last two series Opytnoe Pole and Chagan stem from a 2012 trip to the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan, the location of Soviet nuclear tests, where she photographed architectures specifically built to test the effects of nuclear explosions. Witnessing the extremes of the human capability for destruction led Schulz-Dornburg to abandon photographing new projects after this trip.

Although people are often absent from Schulz-Dornburg's photographs, her work interrogates human history, the human condition, and the impact of human action on the environment and cultural landscapes. Usually focused on the built environment, her series capture spaces that symbolize transition, are engulfed in transformation, or stand as remnants of a transformed past. With her photographs she aims to capture shifts in political power, reflecting on borders and boundaries as they emerge and shift, leaving behind architectural artifacts whose anachronistic nature bears witness to the past.[10] [11] Schulz-Dornburg relates these political and historical transformations to cosmological reflections on humans' place in the universe. Both conceptually and compositionally, for Schulz-Dornburg the horizon is the most important coordinate that anchors a shot and is itself a liminal space of transition.[12]

Most of Schulz-Dornburg's series were shot with a Hasselblad camera, but for some series (notably Kronstadt and Memoryscapes) she used an Canon Ixus camera. Working primarily in black and white and usually printing in silver-gelatin, Schulz-Dornburg's photographs are often characterized by an "objective" deadpan style. This documentary approach results in serial typologies of her subjects, which led to her being stylistically associated with the Düsseldorf School of photography prominently represented by Bernd and Hilla Becher.[13] Schulz-Dornburg's methodical research on each subject matter provides her photographs with intentionality, and their minimalist clarity enriches the seemingly objective stance with symbolic layers, reflecting the inherently political nature of her work. At the same time, the different iterations of a motif convey specific meanings through their seriality. The movement of light in Sonnenstand, for example, traces the movement of time and symbolizes the idea of a cosmological relationship between the stars, nature, and human life. In her series Ewiger Weizen, seriality evidences the vast genetic diversity and its looming loss in the dynamics of modern agriculture, and in her series Archivo de Indias seriality mirrors on a formal level the all-encompassing ambition of the colonial archive.

Most of Schulz-Dornburg's series were published in photo books or exhibition catalogs, many of which were designed by Schulz-Dornburg herself or with her active involvement. Schulz-Dornburg does not pursue new photography projects but continues to exhibit and publish series from her archive. In 2022, Schulz-Dornburg donated her archive to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles where it will be cataloged and made accessible to qualified researchers.

Exhibitions

Schulz-Dornburg had her first exhibition in 1975 at Galerie Wittrock in Düsseldorf and at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich featuring her series Vorhänge am Markusplatz. She exhibited her early work in different galleries and museums across Germany and Austria before entering the international stage with her series Sonnenstand, an entire set of which was acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and exhibited there as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.

The first major retrospective of Schulz-Dornburg's oeuvre titled "Across the Territories" was held at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) in 2002, which showed most of her major series created up until that point. Another important retrospective titled "The Land In-Between" was held first at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt a.M. in 2018[14] and subsequently adapted for Maison européenne de la photographie (MEP) in 2019/2020 under the title "Zone Grise."[15]

Individual series from Schulz-Dornburg's oeuvre were featured in galleries and museums around the world, such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the British Museum, the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvares Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Pergamonmuseum,[16] and the Tate Modern.[17]

Many of Schulz-Dornburg's exhibitions included works by Lawrence Weiner.[18]

Although Schulz-Dornburg retired from actively photographing new projects, she continues to revisit her archive and to exhibit her work in different venues, including hitherto unknown series and prints.[19] [20] She usually assumes an active role in the design of her exhibitions, arranging her series in purposeful hangs and regularly incorporating different material objects.

Publications

Awards

Exhibitions

[23] [24]

Collections

Schulz-Dornburg's work is held in the following public collections:

Notes and References

  1. FOTO-DIALOG Der DFA Podcast #26 - Hans Schreiner: Institut für Bildjournalismus 1950er . 2024-04-03 . Deutsche Fotografische Akademie . 2024-07-10 . YouTube.
  2. Web site: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Donates Archive to the Getty Research Institute Getty News . 2024-07-10 . www.getty.edu . en.
  3. Davis . Lorraine Anne . October 2019 . Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Time and Time Again . Black & White . 135 . 88.
  4. Book: Schulz-Dornburg, Ursula . The land in between: photographs from 1980 to 2012 . Engler . Martin . Elliot . Fiona . Fischer . Christiane . Mack . 2018 . 978-1-912339-10-5 . London . 144 . en.
  5. Book: Schulz-Dornburg, Ursula . Abenteuerspielplätze: ein Plädoyer für wilde Spiele . Zimmer . Jürgen . Schneider . Martina . Econ-Verlag . 1972 . 978-3-430-18191-4 . Düsseldorf; Wien . de . Adventure playgrounds: a plea for wild play.
  6. Book: Smith, Joshua P. . Ursula-Schulz-Dornburg: Sonnenstand . The Corcoran Gallery of Art . 1996 . Washington, DC . en . Exhibition brochure.
  7. Book: Goehler, Adrienne . zur nachahmung empfohlen! expeditionen in ästhetik & nachhaltigkeit . Hatje Cantz Verlag . 2010 . 978-3-7757-2772-3 . Ostfildern . de . recommended for imitation! expeditions in aesthetics & sustainability.
  8. Bärmann . Matthias . As If Without Time: The Nuclear Twilight Zone . Architectural Design . 93 . 4 . 102 . 10.1002/ad.2959.
  9. Book: Bärmann, Matthias . Living in Transition. Photo Series by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg . Gallery Luisotti . 2014 . en . Exhibition brochure.
  10. Web site: Baker . Simon . Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Series and Transformations .
  11. News: Cenicola . Tony . December 18, 2018 . The Best Photo Books of 2018 . July 10, 2024 . The New York Times.
  12. Rynor . Becky . 09/07/2016 . An Interview with Ursula Schulz-Dornburg . NGC Magazine.
  13. Web site: Wilkinson . Tom . 2016-10-04 . ‘The craze for images of Communist architecture can be traced back to the work of one intrepid photographer' . 2024-07-10 . The Architectural Review . en.
  14. Web site: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. The Land In-Between – Photographs from 1980 to 2012 Städel Museum . 2024-07-10 . newsroom.staedelmuseum.de.
  15. Web site: Subscribe . 2019-12-04 . Ursula Schulz-Dornburg . 2024-07-10 . La MEP . en-US.
  16. Web site: Berlin . Staatliche Museen zu . From Medina to the Jordanian Border . 2024-07-10 . www.smb.museum . en.
  17. Web site: Schulz-Dornburg . Ursula . Points of memory: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg – Tate Etc . 2024-07-10 . Tate . en-GB.
  18. Web site: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg + Lawrence Weiner . 2024-07-10 . www.newexhibitions.com.
  19. Web site: Vanished Landscapes - Aedes Architecture Forum . 2024-07-10 . cms.baunetz.de.
  20. Web site: Kulturveranstaltungen des Instituto Cervantes . 2024-07-10 . cultura.cervantes.es . de.
  21. Web site: Aimia . 2016-11-30 . Aimia AGO Photography Prize announces 2016 winner . 2024-07-10 . Aimia . en-CA.
  22. Web site: ApertureDigital . 2018-11-09 . Announcing the Winners of the 2018 PhotoBook Awards . 2024-07-10 . Aperture . en-US.
  23. Web site: Solo Exhibitions . 2024-07-10 . www.schulz-dornburg.com.
  24. Web site: Group Exhibitions . 2024-07-10 . www.schulz-dornburg.com.
  25. Web site: SONNENSTAND 18 November - 19 December 2009 - Overview . 2024-07-10 . Tristan Hoare Gallery . en.
  26. Web site: 2018-08-17. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. Städel Museum.
  27. Web site: 2019-11-17. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. MEP.
  28. Web site: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Memoryscapes — LargeGlass2021 . 2024-07-10 . largeglass.co.uk . en.
  29. Web site: Huts, Temples, Castles - Aedes Architecture Forum . 2024-07-10 . www.aedes-arc.de.
  30. Web site: San Juan de Busa (East) from the series Sonnenstand (Solar Positions), Spain Buffalo AKG Art Museum . 2024-07-08 . buffaloakg.org.
  31. Web site: Getty Research Institute Library Catalog: Photographs from Ursula Schulz-Dornburg's Irak series. .
  32. Web site: Getty Research Institute Library Catalog: Valley of the Tombs, Palmyra. .
  33. Web site: Getty Research Institute Library Catalog: Temple of Bel, Palmyra. .
  34. Web site: Getty Research Institute Library Catalog: Valley of the Tombs from necropolis, Palmyra, Syria. .
  35. Web site: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Donates Archive to the Getty Research Institute Getty News . 2024-07-08 . www.getty.edu . en.
  36. Web site: Getty Research Institute Library Catalog: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Archive .
  37. Web site: Catalogue . 2024-07-08 . IVAM . en-US.
  38. Web site: 2018-09-20. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (German, born 1938) (Getty Museum). J. Paul Getty Museum.
  39. Web site: Aus der Eigenen Sammlung: Steinschiffe. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg – Kunstmuseum Bochum . 2024-07-08 . www.kunstmuseumbochum.de.
  40. Web site: Neuerwerbungen - Kunstsammlung NRW / Online-Sammlung . 2024-07-10 . sammlung.kunstsammlung.de . de.
  41. Web site: Nordrhein-Westfalen . Kunstsammlung . Kunstsammlung NRW: Startseite . 2024-07-10 . Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen . de.
  42. Web site: Collection Milwaukee Art Museum . 2024-07-08 . collection.mam.org.
  43. Web site: artist:"Ursula Schulz-Dornburg" Minneapolis Institute of Art . 2024-07-08 . collections.artsmia.org.
  44. Web site: Collections en ligne Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris . 2024-07-08 . www.mam.paris.fr.
  45. Web site: Museum Ludwig: schulz-dornburg » (3 Dokumente) . 2024-07-08 . museum-ludwig.kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de.
  46. Web site: Artist Info . 2024-07-08 . www.nga.gov.
  47. Web site: National Gallery of Canada: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg .
  48. Web site: Sammlung Ursula Schulz-Dornburg . 2024-07-08 . www.sammlung.pinakothek.de.
  49. Web site: Works – Ursula SCHULZ-DORNBURG – Artists – Collections at SBMA Santa Barbara Museum of Art . 2024-07-08 . collections.sbma.net.
  50. Web site: Tate . Ursula Schulz-Dornburg born 1938 . 2024-07-08 . Tate . en-GB.
  51. Web site: Museum . Victoria and Albert . Search Results V&A Explore the Collections . 2024-07-08 . Victoria and Albert Museum . en.