Secretly in Rome. The travels of photographer Karin Wieckhorst

After training as a gravure retoucher from 1957 to 1960, Karin Wieckhorst (*1942) began her career in photography as a photo lab technician at Funkwerk Leipzig. From 1965, she worked as a photographer at the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig and remained associated with the institution until 2007. At the same time, she undertook a distance-learning course in photography at the city’s Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst from 1969 to 1973. Her work at the museum gave Wieckhorst an insight into non-European cultures and sparked a desire to travel to these regions herself – a wish that remained unfulfilled during the GDR era. However, opportunities to explore within the country became all the more important, for instance through her photographic documentation of Sorbian festivals and customs from the 1970s onwards.

In the early 1980s, she created the social documentary series ‘Körperbehindert’, which was exhibited in her first solo exhibition in 1985 and led to her admission to the Verband Bildender Künstler of the GDR that same year. At that time, Wieckhorst also took many photographs in connection with the EIGEN + ART gallery in Leipzig. There, she documented exhibition openings and took portraits of artists, which she brought together in 1987 in the series “Begegnungen in Ateliers” (Encounters in Studios). These include photographic portraits of Christine Schlegel, which Wieckhorst took on the doorstep of Schlegel’s studio immediately before Schlegel left the country. Through the Verbnd Bildender Künstler, she undertook a trip to West Berlin in 1988. In the video interview, the photographer recalls her desire to travel and describes how both mobility and its restrictions influenced her photographic practice.

For Karin Wieckhorst, so-called ‘trips to the West’ remained the exception in the late 1980s. However, in 1988, a private visit to the Federal Republic of Germany enabled her to travel on unofficially to Paris. A year later, she was granted permission to travel to Cologne for an exhibition of her artist portraits. Armed with a provisional passport applied for on the spot, she then travelled on by train to Rome, without this onward journey having been officially authorised. This stay later gave rise to the photo series ‘Heimlich in Rom’ (Secretly in Rome), which combines ancient and post-ancient cityscapes with scenes of everyday life, thereby offering a personal, artistic perspective on the city. In conversation with Art in Networks, the photographer talks about the circumstances of her travels, the encounters she had along the way, and her return in autumn 1989.

This article was produced as part of a seminar at TU Dresden, led by Prof. Kerstin Schankweiler and Laura-Maria Schulze, with the collaboration of Maja Wildnitz, Amy Richter and Paula Menzel.