Keep a Stiff Upper Lip! Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank

“Meeting the American photographer Robert Frank in East Berlin in 1985 became a key moment for Gundula Schulze Eldowy. Frank and Schulze Eldowy instantly discovered the artistic affinity they shared: their eye for misfits and outcasts, their coupling of social documentary photography and poetry and their absolute independence. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB), who had been born in Erfurt in 1954, Schulze Eldowy refused from the outset to be shoehorned into any dogma. Her pictures were provocative: on the one hand, East Berlin neighbourhoods, where the vestiges of the war were everywhere to be seen, and, on the other, nude portraits, which were unsparing yet sensitive and full of dignity. On the other side of the Iron Curtain was the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank (1924–2019) – regarded to this day as a pioneer of documentary photography – whose 1958 volume of photographs, The Americans, presented a sobering counterimage to the American Dream. Together, they embarked on an intensive exchange of letters that crossed borders and spanned continents. …”