BERNHARD WICKI - PHOTOGRAPHS
Location: Atatürk Culture Center Lefkoşa / Nicosia 1. Stock, across Kyrenia / Girne Gate
Opening: May 12, 2014, at 7.00 p.m., Exhibition until May 17th 2014
Open: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 9.00 a.m. - 3.30 pm, Thursday from 9.00 am - 6.00 pm and on Saturday from 9.00 am – 1.00 pm

Bernhard Wicki (1919-2000) was not only an outstanding film-maker and actor: in the 50s, he also created a photographic work which prepared his career as a film-maker, but at the same time carried a very personal, artistic signature. For Wicki, photography was the key- tool to express himself visually.

In 1952, on the World exhibition for photography in Luzern, Wicki discovered the photographs of the Magnum Agency, which had been founded a few years before by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and a few others. He was fascinated by the photograph of a dying soldier taken by Capa in 1936 during the Spanish civil war.” It is the straight, blunt sight of reality… It lays in the nature of photographs that you can interpret them, look deeper into them; and that if they are relatively good pictures, they do not just reflect reality but leave space for imagination”. Wicki recognized the vastness of the possibilities offered by photography:” I had always considered films and photography as secondary art, and only lived for theater and painting. Yet, this exhibition opened my eyes, and from that moment on, I knew that I had found my vocation. I left the exhibition and walked straight to the next camera-shop, bought a Rolleiflex and sent a telegraph to Lippel, the manager of the Munich National Theater at the time, to ask him for half a year of vacation, or else I would quit. He accepted and I went to Paris and started shooting photographs like a maniac.”
Wicki’s photographs were taken during journeys through Germany, France, Italy, Bosnia, Morocco, Africa, Russia Austria, and North America as well as in his home city Munich. He did not limit himself to a specific theme; he shot anything attracting him visually: people in their existential loneliness, blunt portraits, empty, alienated cities but also breathtakingly poetic landscapes. The photographs give a vivid impression of the times after the catastrophic events of the 2nd World War.
Wicki’s photographic work was soon overshadowed by his overwhelming success as a film-maker, demanded even in Hollywood. For Wicki himself, his photographs were just a phase, to which- unlike posterity- he attached little importance.
The touring exhibition of the Goethe Institut comprises 38 new black-and white prints of Bernard Wicki’s heritage. The exhibition goes along with a bilingual Brochure (German- English), with an introduction by Inka Graeve-Ingelmann, and a selection of his works.

Berhard Wicki’s most famous film: “The bridge” from 1959 (b/w; 103 min.; German with English subtitles) will be screened on 16th May 2014 at 7 pm at the Atatürk Culture Center Lefkoşa / Nicosia. Admission is free!

The exhibition will be presented by the Goethe-Institut Cyprus and the Turkish-Cypriot-German Cultural Association