Boch, Monika von - Saarland Museum Saarbrücken

Monika von Boch was born on 31 March 1915 and died on 4 July 1993. She is one of the most important photographers in Germany. Photographs of her hang for example in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Monika von Boch drew as a young girl, her artistic means at that time were pencil and charcoal. These drawings, which were shown for the first time at the exhibition "Monika von Boch and Her Friends" (July 4 to August 6, 2003) in the museum, bear witness to a great artistic empathy. During this time, she also began to take photographs with a simple camera. Due to the war, she was trained as a nurse in Bad Kreuznach and was also involved in numerous activities, including setting up a nursery in the family business. After the war she was responsible for setting up the company library and organizing the company archive. From 1952 she worked as a factory photographer.

It became artistically exciting for Monika von Boch when she met Otto Steinert, who took over the photography course at the School of Art and Crafts in Saarbrücken in 1948. Monika von Boch became a pupil of Otto Steinert and took evening classes with Otto Steinert, the founder of "subjective photography", from 1950 to 1953. A direction within photography that is not concerned with reproducing objective reality, but with interpreting it, interpreting it through one's own subjective images.

Monika von Boch also turned in this direction. She experimented: she dealt with the texture of fabrics, the structures of different materials, sought a discussion about the light-dark relationships and remained faithful to black and white photography all her life. She showed unusual views such as tilting or changing the object by photographing up and down. By her technique, by the way she represented pipes and toilet bowls, i.e. everyday objects of the most profane kind, she created artistic compositions. Her experiments with a pile of thin cans are already legendary, she experimented with them for a whole decade. Your tree series, Homage to the constructivist artist Piet Mondriaan and her landscape representations document her outspoken sense of form. This artistic flair and her love for experimentation characterize her work and give it a meaning that reaches far beyond the region.

Her artistic striving did not stop when her eyesight weakened. She turned to ceramics and worked on it in the same way as her photographs: textured white clay, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. She also drew again, with a certain, fast line, the yarrow or the development of a poppy blossom emerged.

The brochure "Monika von Boch, Traces - Memories - Moments" was published for the photographer's ninetieth birthday. In addition to unpublished scientific articles, family, colleagues and friends captured memories of the outstanding photographer whose photographs hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and who was Otto Steinert's student.