Willy-Brandt-Haus | »The eternal moment« – Photographs and films by Digne M. Marcovicz

For two decades as a press photographer, Digne M. Marcovicz (1934-2014) has been shaping the view of Germany’s cultural life. In the 1950s and 1960s, she portrayed among others Ernst Bloch interviewing Rudi Dutschke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll and Gerhard Richter. She had a special connection to the cinematic scene and taking backstage photos of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Hanna Schygulla and many others.

With her images, the photographer intended to capture the authentic moment which characterises a person or an occasion. In doing so she didn’t lay much emphasis on aesthetics for its own sake. Her images were particularly intended to appear realistic and to communicate stories. So it seemed natural that she started to work as a documentary maker for her own projects as of the 1980s. In addition, she created sophisticated books, such as a publication on the holocaust which was awarded the Gustav-Heinemann-Friedenspreis für Kinder- und Jugendbücher (Gustav Heinemann prize for children and youth books). With her spiritual intensity at work, her perseverance pursuing projects, her masterly grasp and her sensitive instinct for people, she created a body of work which offers more than a picture of moments of contemporary history.

Digne Meller Marcovicz descended from a respectable Berlin family. Her mother, Rahel-Maria Bontjes van Beek, née Weisbach, was an emancipated woman at that time, who had been successfully earning a living in Germany as an interior architect until 1935, when the Nuremberg Race Laws prohibited her to do so. Her father, Jan Bontjes van Beek and her half-sister Cato were arrested in 1942 owing to their connections to the resistance movement (“Red Orchestra”). Cato was executed in Plötzensee.

Digne M. Marcovicz studied photography in Munich. Since 1961 she had been working as a free-lance photojournalist and journalist for newspapers and publishing houses. From 1964 to 1985 she was a “permanent freelance” photojournalist at the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Furthermore, she worked as a film maker and author.

Digne M. Marcovicz bequeathed her photographic work to the photo agency bpk owned by Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
The press photographer did not want a conventional presentation of her pictures. She loved the field of tension between image and words, thus the exhibition’s design was to point to the works‘ origin in editing. This is why we decided to print them on newsprint paper and put them on the wall as galley proofs. The contact sheets of her negatives convey an additional insight into her way of working.

Digne M. Marcovicz called her book The Eternal Moment, on which she gathered the favourite pictures of half a century from her own archives. A selection of those and some of her documentaries can be viewed in the exhibition.

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Opening: Thursday, February 4, 2016, 19h

Introduction:
Gisela Kayser, Geschäftsführerin Freundeskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus
Speech:
Volker Schlöndorff, Regisseur
Hanns-Peter Frentz, Leiter bpk – Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte Valentin Bontjes van Beek, Sohn von Digne M. Marcovicz
Martin Koerber, Leiter des Filmarchivs der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek

The exhibition »Papa’s cinema is dead« will be opening on the same day.

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Film night from 21h / Lange Filmnacht ab 21.00 Uhr

Schatten, BRD 1960 (9:23 min)
Kurzfilm, Regie Hansjürgen Pohland
Praktisch bildbar. Ein Wolfsjunge in Frankfurt, BRD 1982 (75:00 min)
Dokumentarfilm von Digne M. Marcovicz
Mannequins, BRD 1961 (2:24 min)
Werbefilm, Regie Hansjürgen Pohland
Tobby, BRD 1960 (81:00 min)
Experimentelle Mischung aus Spiel- und Dokumentarfilm, Regie Hansjürgen Pohland

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