Wolfgang Sievers: A Life charts and celebrates the odyssey-like life and art of one of Australia’s most significant and influential photographers.
Wolfgang Sievers: A Life is a reflective, autobiographical exhibition comprising one hundred photographs made over a career spanning more than fifty years. The exhibition traces Sievers’ life shaped by war and emigration and marked by a lasting social and political consciousness demonstrated by a number of individual -powerfully symbolic gestures. Wolfgang Sievers is best known for his photographs showing man in industry and for his passion for notions of integrity and quality.
A remarkable stylistic consistency characterises Sievers work - his photographs are often bold compositions rendered in sharp focus with a strong graphic quality and a highly charged dramatic use of depth of field. A grand sense of scale characterises much of his industrial photography – the viewer is encouraged to respond to vast spaces rendered even larger by wide views.
The exhibition has been created by Sievers around a series of themes and bodies of work including; his family, his early photographs in Germany and Portugal, Industry, Architecture and Indigenous Australia. The exhibition also features a series works made in 1977 on the topic of Colombian prehistory, ruins and archaeology. In this series, some forty years after his aborted studies in Berlin, he returned to his early interest in archaeology.
Supported by the Goethe Institut, Melbourne and RMIT Gallery
