LEICA Barnack Berek Blog: LEICA EXHIBITION: ROLF SACHS - CAMERA IN MOTION

A new photography exhibition opened at the Leica Gallery at Leitz Park in Wetzlar. The exhibition “Camera in Motion: from Chur to Tirano” shows momentary impressions of the spectacular scenery of the UNESCO World Heritage Albula/Bernina railway journey.

At the end of 2012, Rolf Sachs began taking photos of the landscape elements of the Rhaetian railway line from the window of a moving train. Over the course of twelve months, he photographed building facades, trains and forests with his Leica S camera, documenting various scenes from different viewpoints. Despite the high speed of the train, the results are of extraordinary quality. Viewed singly, Rolf Sachs’ photos are snapshots that have captured a fleeting moment. Together, they reveal the inexorable passage of time as reflected in the speed of the journey and the changing of the seasons. Poised between abstraction and reality, they highlight the contrast between the object the camera focuses on and the passing scenery, which lends them a strong painterly component.

Rolf Sachs was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1955 and studied in both England and the USA. Inspired as a young teenager by the art that surrounded him, he became an artist himself in the late eighties, working in photography, sculpture, set design and installation. Sachs is interested in everyday objects and their materiality, looking for the extraordinary and unconventional in them which he brings to light in a conceptual language in his multidisciplinary work.

The photos are available for sale (prices on request).

The photos are being exhibited together with the photo exhibition, the sculpture “gaudi”, a wooden sledge about four meters long from the series “Typically German?”. Drawing inspiration from the diversity of German culture, Rolf Sachs focused on “typically German” attributes for the solo exhibition “Typically German?” in the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne, interpreting them in a varied, subtle and sometimes tongue-in-cheek manner in the form of unusual objects.