The discovery: an old wooden trunk filled with pictures of the past. They were photographed by Friedrich Wilhelm, known as “Fide”, Struck (1901–1985), who grew up in modest circumstances in Hamburg. As a young man he was a follower of the youth and scouting movement, and in 1926 he became a member of the Gildenhall/Neuruppin housing estate for artists and craftspeople.
Fide Struck later worked as a bookkeeper in Berlin before becoming unemployed in 1932 and then using his benefit payment to purchase new photo equipment for himself. He captured images from the everyday lives of workers in the Hamburg district of Altona and along the West Coast. With a sense of empathy he draws attention to dockers and other workers in the harbour, women selling fish or other items at the market, and crab fishermen.
Struck’s photos are thus documents of the multifaceted phenomenon of amateur and worker photography in the final phase of the Weimar Republic, which was characterised by economic, social and political fragmentation. The pictures are conglomerations of private experience, social journalism and political context. Their unconventional vantage points based on the pictorial idiom of the New Objectivity and New Vision are captivating.
In 1941 Fide Struck packed around 3,000 glass and film negatives into a wooden trunk. It was not until 2015 (after 74 years) that this trunk was reopened – by his son, the film-maker Thomas Struck. The exhibition at Museum Kunst der Westküste presents around 60 of these impressive black-and-white photographs.
A catalogue will be published to accompany the show.
Fide Struck, Deichtormarkt, junger Mann mit Karre, beladen mit Körben und Fässern (detail), um 1930, © bpk / Fide Struck / Slg. Thomas Struck
