Michael Friedel

Born in 1935, Michael Friedel is one of the busiest German photographers of the 1950s to 1990s. Nevertheless, his work is little known in photo circles.

Its color-intensive South Seas and island images are usually connoted with travel and tourism. His great reportages for Quick, Stern or GEO are history.His early photographs in black and white, his well-seen street pictures or surprising portraits of prominent contemporaries from Sophia Loren or Elvis Presley to Rainer Werner Fassbinder have hardly been shown or published recently.

Michael Friedel stayed in a terrain where he is allowed to do everything: black and white and colorful, participating and winking, meditative and overwhelming, quiet and surprising, informative and culinary, epic and detail obsessed. The Leica Gallery Frankfurt will be showing for the first time the extensive work of five decades of the sensitive narrator, the discoverer of the world and convinced journalist Michael Friedel.