Chargesheimer

Chargesheimer — the professional name of Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer (1924–1971) — is regarded as one of the central photographic personalities of post-war Cologne. Trained across several semesters at the Cologne Werkschulen and the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, he never completed a regular course of study; instead he worked as a light-graphics experimenter and stage photographer, and considered himself an artist working across media rather than a photographer alone, active also as a painter, sculptor and stage designer.

From the early 1950s he undertook commercial and advertising commissions, which he also taught as a lecturer at the Bi-Kla School in Düsseldorf until 1955. His exhibitions of this period increasingly turned toward people as subject, a focus that culminated in a dense sequence of photobooks. Between 1957 and 1960 he published seven volumes on Cologne and the Rhineland, the Ruhr region and Berlin, establishing him as an exceptional, often unsparing observer of his own environment and contemporaries — books that, though sometimes controversial on publication, are now considered landmarks of post-war German photography.

After these successes Chargesheimer turned increasingly to the theatre, designing sets and directing, while continuing to produce kinetic sculptures he called "meditation mills." His theatre work resulted in the illustrated book Theater — Theater (1967). The esteem in which he was held in literary circles is reflected in introductions to his books by writers including Heinrich Böll and Martin Walser.

In his final photobooks, on Hanover and Cologne (1970), a new pictorial register emerged, rooted in New Objectivity but sharpened by a critical eye toward choice of location and exaggerated perspective — a persistence of black-and-white photography against the trend of the time that has been read both as a late stylistic turn and as a sign of encroaching depression. Chargesheimer retired at the end of 1971 and died that year in Cologne.