Herlinde Koelbl: Metamorphosen

Herlinde Koelbl, who is arguably the most important portrait and people photographer of our time, has added a new, inspiring chapter to her extensive photographic oeuvre. For the first time, her project “Metamorphoses” does not show the human being itself, but reflects its existence in the essence of the ever-changing nature.

Already her earlier series of politicians, whom Koelbl accompanied with her camera over decades, her ‘Jewish Portraits’, in which she recorded survivors of the Shoah, or her photographs of scientists are characterized by a deep interest in the flowing into each other of past and present as a state of permanent change. Just as the transformation of human beings through time, history and experience is reflected in the faces of the people she portrays, it now appears metaphorically in Koelbl's new photographs in a conglomeration of colorful images of nature.