The first photograph that I saw by Andreas Weinand, which must have been fifteen years ago now, depicted depraved-looking young people at some sort of heavy metal party. It had been taken on a Christmas Eve in the late 1980s. I remember thinking then that the photographer must be some kind of tough guy. The photographs struck me as unbelievably harsh, full of an archaic power. They were, in the best sense of the word, atmospheric - instantly transporting me to a environment I wished to have nothing to do with. In another photograph from the same series, two young men stand on their hands in the pounding surf of a beach in Portugal. This picture had an equal force, an equal intensity, and the young pair portrayed here, I learned later, belonged to the same group of adolescents.
Andreas Weinand entitled this series, his early 1990s graduation project at the University in Essen, Finding Oneself. The title indicates that this series means much more to Andreas than merely a reportage on a youthful gang. It is representative of a stance in the world of photography rare back then and nearly absent now. Andreas Weinand was striving to expand the genre of the photo-reportage, in order to arrive at a universal statement defining youth and the search for onself. Even though he was close to his protagonists, he was not afraid to trespass boundaries, and did not shirk from taking photographs that were intimate, at the same time using the camera as a dissecting scalpel. In doing so, he left the traditional (and at that point the only acceptable) black and white form of reportage far behind him. At the same time he made it clear that while the esssayistic devices used by Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson during the 1960s and 1970s in their monumental books, The Bikeriders, and Brooklyn Gang were stylistically adequate for capturing that particular epoch, they were nevertheless not suitable for mediating the youth culture of the 1980s.(full article is available after purchasing a subscription - not available now)
Andreas Weinand entitled this series, his early 1990s graduation project at the University in Essen, Finding Oneself. The title indicates that this series means much more to Andreas than merely a reportage on a youthful gang. It is representative of a stance in the world of photography rare back then and nearly absent now. Andreas Weinand was striving to expand the genre of the photo-reportage, in order to arrive at a universal statement defining youth and the search for onself. Even though he was close to his protagonists, he was not afraid to trespass boundaries, and did not shirk from taking photographs that were intimate, at the same time using the camera as a dissecting scalpel. In doing so, he left the traditional (and at that point the only acceptable) black and white form of reportage far behind him. At the same time he made it clear that while the esssayistic devices used by Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson during the 1960s and 1970s in their monumental books, The Bikeriders, and Brooklyn Gang were stylistically adequate for capturing that particular epoch, they were nevertheless not suitable for mediating the youth culture of the 1980s.(full article is available after purchasing a subscription - not available now)