Bill Kouwenhoven, FOTO8
…Yet it is in the pictures of Heinrich Völkel, “Germany’s Best,” and Wolfgang Bellwinkel, “Heimat II,” that the theme of Germany, per se, is most directly addressed…
Bellwinkel’s take is much more melancholy. His images of Sunday outings in the provinces, castles, suburbia, woods, and lakes are neither here nor there – which is his point exactly. As a journalist who has spent much of his time in Asia, Bellwinkel seems to be attempting to ground himself. His look at classic German themes such as Nature, so beloved by Caspar David Friedrich and the other Romantic painters and writers, seems very flat, distant even. It is a very cool look, if not exactly cold. The people in his pictures are strangely apart as though lost in their own thoughts…