Stefan Falke: “Wall(s)”
Where: Deutsches Haus at NYU
42 Washington Mews
212-998-8660 Price: Free
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Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a photography exhibition of Stefan Falke’s “Wall(s)”. Please join us for the exhibition opening and a conversation between the photographer Stefan Falke and the journalist and author Claudia Steinberg on April 28 at 6 pm.
Since Stefan Falke began photographing artists on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border in 2008, the physical barrier itself has been a prominent and unavoidable protagonist in his work. His intent has always been to shine a spotlight on the cultural vitality of the region, and over the years Falke has portrayed about 200 painters, architects, designers, photographers, musicians, and writers, documenting a creative exuberance that is almost completely overlooked in the media. Inevitably, the fence became a potent visual presence in his images as a symbol for La Frontera – a painfully divided yet multicultural, cosmopolitan and resilient region that is its own country.
In the current political climate, these images from the embattled border territory take on an added historical weight. They serve as an important reminder of the shared humanity on both sides of the border.
Stefan Falke was born and raised in Paderborn, Germany. He worked as a photographer’s assistant in Munich and later as a silk-screen printer in Hamburg. He moved to New York in 1985 and later worked as a film-set photographer, mostly for movies filmed in Europe and Africa. Besides working on assignments, he started photographing a long-term project about a stilt-walking school in the Caribbean entitled Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad, which was exhibited at the international photo journalism festival Visa Pour L’Image in 2004 in Perpignan, France, and published as a book in New York the same year (Pointed Leaf Press). Falke became a member of the prestigious German photo agency laif / agentur fuer photos und reportagen in 1999. His book La Frontera was published in Germany in 2014. Stefan Falke has lived in Brooklyn, New York, since 2002.
Since Claudia Steinberg left Germany for New York City in 1980, she has been covering a wide range of subjects like art, travel, design, social issues, and fashion for German publications like Vogue, Die Zeit, Cicero, Kunstzeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She has been the U.S. correspondent for the German architecture and design magazine Architektur & Wohnen since 1999 and has also written for the home section of The New York Times, Surface, and Interior Design Magazine. In 2004, a book of essays on art and food appeared in collaboration with photographer Bärbel Miebach, followed by The Art of Living, published by Monacelli Press in 2009. In 2012, she wrote and co-directed a documentary on the New York Waterfront for the French/German television station Arte. Claudia joined photographer Stefan Falke at the U.S.-Mexican border by Tijuana twice, and authored the foreword to La Frontera. She is currently working on a collection of oral histories about life in the Rockaways.
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