Since 1987 I have been working as a photo artist and photo journalist for German and international media. The most important photographs from my work are divided into cycles and develop over the years from an interplay of independent and commissioned works, book and exhibition projects.
The focus of my photography is the human being. From different directions, I intuitively approach my "surroundings". The result is a contemporary "document" of a world that nourishes me through its social changes and the global turn of time of the last decades. My work is divided into at least four cycles, which in turn consist of individual series. These develop over the years from an interplay of independent and commissioned works, book and exhibition projects. "Power and Ritual" deals with social stagings in politics, church, demimonde, economy and the media. The scenes in "Black East Wild West" lie at the intersections of the secular and the sacred, on moving masses and moving people and their search for "salvation". In the series " Unbedeutende Persönlichkeiten" ("Insignificant Personalities"), the portraits in the series draw their tension from the interplay of portrayed acquaintances and well-known personalities, the closeness and distance and the transience of the moment. In the latest cycle "Digitalis", the transition from the analogue to the digital age is "documented" in various series from different directions, with the associated dissolution of the authenticity of photography.
Project Talk: Bernd Arnold – Power and Ritual Interview by Peter Feldhaus (Sonic Blog), 2009. - German Version -
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PDF Presentation
Project Talk: Bernd Arnold – Power and Ritual Interview by Peter Feldhaus (Sonic Blog), 2009. - English Version -
Format:
PDF Presentation
The hermetic and hierarchic world of the clergy of the Cologne Cathedral is marked by merit and mercy, by sorrow and hope, by sin and salvation. The pictures analyse the power structures of an autonomic system of salvation, surviving seemingly untouched by all developments of our century.
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The election campaigns for the German Bundestag are an ideal occasion to explore strategies of production and self-production across all political parties. This cycle is a work about the endeavour of shading light on the precisely calculated gestures of the actors of these public orchestration, their success in radiate aspects of power and its fascination. These photographs expose politics as theatre. These are pictures of the chancellors Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel and the challengers Franz Josef Strauss, Hans Jochen Vogel, Johannes Rau, Oskar Lafontaine, Rudolf Scharping, Edmund Stoiber, Fank-Walter Steinmeier, Peer Steinbrück and Martin Schulz.
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Dark mass, bizarre situations, shadowy portraits and questionable details vary between the real and the fictional. In Western Europe, the interfaces (entrance/exit) between the secular and the sacral were in former centuries the portals of the cathedrals. Nowadays, the interfaces are more in shopping streets and mass events where human fates are in search of salvation. The growing globalization of the last decades promises more independency and individualism. But is this really true? Are the dependency and synchronization of each other are really less than before?
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Portrait Series XIII - Artists at the Cologne Kunsthaus Rhenania The portraits in series draw their tension from the interplay of portrayed acquaintances and well-known personalities, closeness and distance. The selection of the portraits follows the randomness of the encounters and the transience of the moments.
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