Flieg. All that is solid
Exhibition texts
“The task of philosophy of photography is to address the issue of freedom to photographers. Urgent philosophy because it is, perhaps, the only revolution still possible.”
Vilém Flusser, 1985
Hans Gunter Flieg, born in Chemnitz, Germany on July 3, 1923, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. With the intensification of Nazi extremism against Jews, Flieg’s family decided to emigrate. Between May and July 1939, Flieg studied in Berlin with Grete Karplus, who had been a photographer at the Jewish Museum in Berlin (opened in 1933 and closed by the Nazis in 1938) and taught the profession to young apprentices in her apartment. It is with this initial background in learning photography, both in the authorial and professional fields, that Flieg landed in Brazil with his family in December 1939 at the age of 16, settling in São Paulo. In 1945, he began his career as a professional photographer, starting a practice of more than forty years in the universe of industry, advertising, architecture and arts photography.
Hans Gunter Flieg’s work contributes to the understanding of the shaping structures of contemporary society. His photography, to a large extent, incorporates elements of modernity associated, for example, with the German New Objectivity of the 1920s and 1930s. Flieg’s works gathered for this exhibition — in this year in which the photographer turns 100 years old —, turn to the direct photographic record of industrialized objects, among other elements of the materiality of the world, as proposed by Albert Renger-Patzsch in his famous publication Die Welt ist schön [The World is Beautiful] of 1928, as well as to the record of the industrial space, its architecture, facilities, and equipment. In a parallel path to the work developed by the artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher in post-war Germany, although unique, Flieg’s photography is also partly related to elements of the resumption of a more conceptual and critical objectivity, as can be seen in his works of serial documentation of the constitutive elements of industrial society, which lead, in many cases, to images that transcend their referential and documentary dimension, expanding and updating the relevance of the photographer’s production in the scope of modern and contemporary photography in Brazil.
Flieg’s look at a longed industrial society that modernized post-war São Paulo, without breaking, however, with the mechanisms of reification, alienation and power of his time, leads us to reflect now, decades later, on a post-industrial society equally immersed in deep and radical transformations and contradictions, in which once again “all that is solid melts into air”, if we were to remember the phrase with which in 1848 Karl Marx described the permanent transformation of objects into capital in the midst of the industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century.
In current times, however, the axis of accumulation shifts from industrial production and industrial products to the fields of knowledge and communication, to the broad and pervasive field of data and algorithms, where, as Vilém Flusser points out, conquering freedom is necessarily and inescapably becoming aware of the structures that govern images, information, programs and devices, “perhaps the only revolution still possible”. Or, as Marshall Berman put it in the early 1980s, “appropriating yesterday’s modernities can be both a critique of today’s modernities and an act of faith in the modernities — and in modern men and women — of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”
Hans Gunter Flieg’s complete photographic work consists of more than 59,000 negatives and photographs and contains photographic records that begin in Germany and extend until the mid-1980s in Brazil. In July 2006, it was incorporated into the collection of the Moreira Salles Institute and has since been available and open for research and studies of its important documentary and aesthetic aspects.
Sergio Burgi
Hans Gunter Flieg: A Theater of Industrial Society on the Centenary of its Author
When Hans Gunter Flieg arrives in Brazil in 1939, aged 16, he finds a nation in a growing process of industrialization — the “country of the future”, according to the epithet that the German-language writer Stefan Zweig would present to the world in 1941. This country would raise, even under Vargas’ dictatorship, hopes on a world that differed from the one that the young Flieg had left: Europe destroyed by the war waged by Nazism and fascism and by its policy of persecution and extermination of people who, like the young photographer, were born and raised in a Jewish family.
Shortly after opening his photographic studio in 1945, Flieg dedicates himself for decades not only to documenting industrial projects commissioned by large companies but also to photographing architecture and products which he would register as the structuring elements of the emerging industrial society. Flieg’s documentary photography, as well as his advertising work, are fascinating illustrations of the phrase with which Marx had described the transformation of the commodity into value: “all that is solid melts into air”. By photographing places of industrial society, where one can find factories, shops, or the São Paulo Art Biennial, by photographing industrialized and artistic artifacts exhibited in the context of that same society, Flieg stages a meticulous theater of objects and spaces — a theater in which the scenographic dimension of each photograph builds up, together with the framing, each composition, virtually articulating light, contrast, and the ordering of reality. All the paradoxes of the relationship between the materiality of the world and its representation as an image, between the object and its unobjective presentation, find in Flieg’s photography an extraordinary synthesis, which this exhibition manifests and documents.
Celebrating the happy occasion of Hans Gunter Flieg’s centenary by presenting the exhibition Flieg. All that is solid is for Instituto Moreira Salles an excellent opportunity to show once again one of the most unique and coherent authorial works developed in the history of Brazilian photography. Preserving in its collection about 35,000 negatives produced by the photographer, IMS once again brings to reflection and research a clipping of a work that surprisingly follows the issues that had been raised before by photographers and artists of the so-called New Objectivity in the context of German photography, and conceptual art photography of the 1960s.
The IMS expresses its utmost gratitude to Hans Gunter Flieg for the work that this exhibition summarizes, as well as for the generosity with which he accompanied the process of its preparation. We also thank the curatorial work developed by Sergio Burgi and Mariana Newlands; we also address a word of recognition to all who, in IMS, once again made this realization possible.
Marcelo Araújo, general director
João Fernandes, artistic director
Instituto Moreira Salles
Hans Gunter Flieg has documented factory plans and buildings designed by important architects, such as the Duchen Factory, built on Presidente Dutra Highway by Oscar Niemeyer, a project that won the first prize in the industrial construction category in the First São Paulo Biennial in 1951. As the only manufacturing facility project executed by Niemeyer, this innovative architectural building was demolished in 1990, despite the listing process led by the Council for the Defense of the Historical, Archaeological, Artistic and Tourist Heritage of the State of São Paulo (CONDEPHAAT).
Flieg also photographed Pirelli’s new administrative building, designed and executed by building company Warchavchik-Neumann Ltda. It opened in 1961 to house its Brazilian headquarters, located at the corner of Barão de Piracicaba Street and Ribeiro da Silva Boulevard. It was a modern project that counted with the participation of Gregori Warchavchik, a modernist architect and a photographer associated with the modern photography circuit in Brazil, whose collection is also preserved at IMS.
For the Brazilian Aluminum Company (Companhia Brasileira de Alumínio / CBA), Flieg photographed the construction of the roof of Ibirapuera sports stadium, a project made by architect Icaro de Castro Mello. He occupies a unique position in the history of modern Brazilian architecture for being one of the rare examples of architects who focused on a specific theme. The author of a hundred sports buildings in Brazil and throughout Latin America, Castro Mello developed the project of Ibirapuera gymnasium for the celebrations of the iv Centenary of the Foundation of São Paulo in 1954.
In addition to industrial architecture records, there was a variety of other commissioned jobs that Flieg carried out in the architectural photography field, especially those associated to the crescent verticalization of São Paulo in the 1940s and 1950s. He recorded both industrial and business headquarters in the city center, as well as several real estate launches, which represented a new urban housing proposal based on buildings with small apartment plans. It was a true process of industrialization and manufacturing of a new urban dwelling, verticalized and compact. Thousands of new residential units were then to be furnished and equipped by a new industry of consumer goods, such as household appliances, crockery, crystal, cutlery and new lines of compact and industrialized furniture, made with new manufacturing materials, such as pressed plywood sheets and new industrial laminates for coating and finishing.
It is from Flieg’s records of a new industrial architecture in São Paulo that we enter the extensive documentation carried out by him, always rigorously and penetratingly. A record of industrial facilities, factory spaces, machinery and equipment, as well as products and mass consumption objects produced by this intense process of industrialization, which, through advertising, propaganda and renewed consumption cycles, have transformed the whole social, economic and political process in the country over the last seven decades.
Re-reading of Flieg’s collection at the beginning of the 21st century — when society is characterized by the construction of the knowledge and information, as opposed to the industrial society of last century — allows his work to be interpreted within new perspectives. His photographs of industrial installations are always built in a very consciously formal manner. Such characteristics can be observed both in the use of the traditional large format tilting camera — as preconized by photographers such as Germaine Krull, in Germany, and Charles Sheeler, in the USA —, and in the use of the relatively new Leica small format camera, which established, in the interwar period of the 1920s and under the influence from the Staatliches Bauhaus (a German school of applied arts, especially plastic arts, architecture and design) as well as the Russian and Soviet constructivism of Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, the basis for a new photography.
Flieg’s work was carried out within the perspective of the German school of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), which aimed at the direct photographic registration of industrialized and natural objects, as well as the registration of industrial space, its facilities and its equipment. On the other hand, Flieg’s photography is also related to elements of the subsequent resumption of a contemporary objectivity, more conceptual and critical, which focused on documenting the constructive and architectural elements of an entropic industrial society. Such documentation was carried out by several post-war photographers. The ambivalence of the photographic objectivity itself, now performed on in a postmodern critical sense, is what ultimately allows the images to be released from their original contexts, thus enabling formal and poetic readings of the registered objects and equipment that transcend their referential and documentary dimension. Flieg’s industrial photographs, produced between the 1940s and 1980s, always rigorously made, also allows structures, equipment and industrial objects registered in an objective and direct way to lead, in many cases, to a current re-reading of these images, especially those with a strong bias of monumentality and abstraction. Such re-reading expands and updates the relevance of the photographer’s production in the scope of modern and contemporary photography in Brazil.
Since the 1940s when he began to work professionally in Brazil, Flieg’s work combines mastery in the formal elaboration of the photographic image with absolute control of lighting, exposure and film processing and enlargements. These extremely elaborate images, produced mostly as commissioned works, especially the photographs of industries and products, lead us to a new imaginary universe of the period based on the “ecstasy of things” characteristic of the post-war period — a period in which a strong resumption of industrial growth cycles took place, although no longer founded on military efforts but on the production of capital and consumer goods aimed at realizing value in a context of rapid urban and population growth. This process was marked in Brazil and other countries by the strong migration from the countryside to the cities. In this context, photography becomes in fact the tool par excellence for the registration and visualization of objects of the industrial society, as well as for their subsequent commercialization and circulation, since advertising and publicity, especially from the 1950s onwards, will massively incorporate photography into their convincing, seducing and reifying tools, enabling consumer manufactured goods to reward the invested capital. And it is through this recurrent cycle of capital, which in its permanent value accumulation transforms and liquefies everything, that today one can understand the radical displacement of industrial and social materiality so iconically represented in Flieg’s photographs gathered here. In the current and apparent dematerialization of the world promoted by virtualization and the alienating spectacularization of the increasingly intense processes and cycles of value accumulation in the new algorithm industry, again, “all that is solid melts into air”.
In 1951, Hans Gunter Flieg was the official photographer for the First São Paulo International Biennal, organized by the Museum of Modern Art (Museu de Arte Moderna / MAM-SP). He photographed award-winning works and rooms from different countries, recording paintings and sculptures. Of all the sculptures he photographed, the work Unidade Tripartida, by the Swiss artist Max Bill, first prize in sculpture at that Biennial, is perhaps the one that best represents and problematizes the challenges of photographic representation of three-dimensional objects. The photo is one among hundreds of possibilities for representing the sculpture. Therefore, it configures a conscious choice made by the photographer in view of the need to better represent three-dimensionality in two dimensions. Flieg’s choice made the photo one of the best known and most widespread images of Max Bill’s work.
The construction of a wide repertoire of product images and industrial objects in the work of Hans Gunter Flieg is the result of numerous commissioned works he has carried out for industries and advertising agencies. It should not be understood as the production of just another broad and diversified visual catalog of consumer goods, but rather as an intensely refined effort he put into image production, combining both lighting resources and studio editing to build an intense representation of the materiality, design, and functionality of the photographed objects. In Flieg’s work, the same rigor at documenting artwork is also present in photographing everyday objects.
What reifies these products and transforms them into desirable consumer goods is the recontextualization of these images in advertising and marketing — a process which allows the “ecstasy of things” to come up powered by the strength of images. The greater meaning of the photography of objects and industrial marketing in the advertising field is always, in a way, the construction of a hallucination of an inaccessible present, of a fetish and a desire to be necessarily accomplished through consumption. The act of taking possession of the object to be consumed is a fundamental moment in the realization of value that remunerates the capital originally invested, the moment in which the fundamental social and economic relations that structure our society are materialized and reaffirmed.
A significant part of the images of products made by Flieg and gathered in this room, especially those from the 1950s, keep a distance between their exceptional quality, obtained in the photographic studio, and the quality of graphic printing available at that time, still relatively precarious. It was only in the 1970s that mass print advertising achieved a quality of printing, both in black and white and in color, able to emulate the original quality of the photographs on the printed page more regularly and consistently, further enhancing the role of photography in the representation of the object as a fetish. Advertising and marketing are essential tools in the cycle of production, distribution, commercialization and consumption of goods and products. Image has always been present in this cycle, initially as a drawing and illustration and later as direct photographic record. Medium and message have always been decisive in the communication process with consumers. The printed page, video and digital media are just subsequent steps in this process. Andy Warhol’s and Geraldo de Barros’ pop art by signals this issue by bringing critical thinking closer to the domain of advertising and consumption in industrial society. From the fascination and fetish of products and objects, we move today, as consumers, to a new fascination and dependence on a continuous and endless flow of data and information on digital networks, on a scale that is always unattainable. We move from the reification of the desired objects typical from the industrial society to a growing alienation of critical thinking, which takes place both in an economy of attention, which seeks to occupy all spaces and times available to new digital consumers, and in a society of spectacle and of spectacularization, which still insists on blindly facing the present challenges and contradictions of the Anthropocene.
1923-1939
Hans Gunter Flieg was born in 1923 in Chemnitz, Germany, then known as the “Manchester of Saxony” due to its primarily industrial economy specialized in the textile sector.
In his house, engravings and sculptures of notable German expressionists — some members of the Die Brücke group based in Dresden, such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach — coexisted with special editions of artists and writers published in Leipzig by a society of bibliophiles of which his father was an associate, together with design objects, such as special glasses from Bohemia and Silesia and wooden objects from Saxony itself.
At that moment, the then Weimar Republic sought to overcome the effects of the defeat suffered by Germany in the First War, turning to the construction of a modern Germany, based on a critical rationalism, which would structure both science and technology as well as the arts and the culture. The time is one of relative stability and progress and extends from the mid-1920s to about 1929-1930. In the visual arts, the New Objectivity of Albert Renger-Patzsch and his book Die Welt ist schön coexists with the architectural functionalism of Walter Gropius, who in 1919 founded Bauhaus. László Moholy-Nagy, professor at the same school, published his book Painting, Photography, Film in 1925 and stated that “the illiterate of the future will not be the one who ignores writing, but photography”. Weimar, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Dessau thus became, in those years, centers of reference and avant-garde in politics, the arts, science and technology.
Flieg’s social and cultural references, starting from his childhood, gravitate, therefore, around the axes of industry and applied arts, characteristic both of that region of Saxony and of other regions of Germany; they also gravitate towards visual arts and literature, present both in their narrower and wider family circle. It should be mentioned here the trajectory of Stefan Heym, Flieg’s cousin, and a writer exiled in the usa since 1933, but who was expelled from the country in the period of McCarthyism due to being close to labor movements. Heym then returns to Germany and becomes one of the most important writers on the eastern side. After the reunification, he became a member and president of the German Senate and died in 2011.
It is, therefore, in this context of political, social and cultural effervescence, in a Germany that in just two decades, between 1919 and 1939, transited from progressive and radical democratic and cultural experiences to a fascist authoritarian regime that led to World War ii, that Flieg grows up and carries out his primary and secondary studies.
The experience with arts and culture in the family and school context combines with an early practice of photography. In 1932, his uncle gave him his first camera and, between that year and 1939, Flieg photographed his family, especially during vacation periods. Since then Flieg takes excellent pictures of his family members throughout his life; these photos, however, he would prefer to keep within the restricted scope of his private universe.
After the rise of Nazi extremism against the Jews, marked by the night of November 9, 1938 (“Night of Broken Glass”), Flieg’s family effectively decides to emigrate. For the young Flieg, this decision will make it necessary to seek training for a job that will allow him to work in another country. Photography was the chosen activity, as he was already familiar with this language and because of the universal nature of this form of expression and recording. Flieg’s first works were made with the Leica camera during his apprenticeship in Berlin. They already indicate his approach to a modern photographic language in line with the influences that emerged at that moment of profound renewal in the visual arts. While the more authorial work carried out in Berlin’s urban space seeks a bold construction of the image, the work in the studio, guided by Greta Karplus, turns to application, to making images that operate in the field of advertising, illustration, and communication. Flieg seeks to elaborate images that literally translate the original concept of the message to be conveyed.
It is with this initial background in learning photography, both in the authorial and professional fields, that Flieg arrives in Brazil with his family in December 1939 at the age of 16, settling in São Paulo.
The sequential images contained in the 35 mm roll of film that accompanied Flieg during the trip, kept inside his Leica, are emblematic of the changing universe he experienced at the time: the last image is taken from the window of the family’s apartment in Chemnitz in August from 1939 and follows the first image taken on Brazilian soil, at the entrance to the house in São Paulo, in December 1939. These two images represent, on the one hand, the profound rupture that Flieg’s family went through, provoked by the Nazi persecution to the Jews, and, on the other hand, the hopes of reconstructing a new life in exile, which would represent, due to the simple acts of surviving and existing, the complete defeat of their executioners.
1940-1945
As it did with the Flieg’s family, the European crisis provoked an intense emigration of European professionals, intellectuals and artists to the Americas. In Brazil, the main destinations of these immigrants are cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Germans, Hungarians, Poles, French, Italians, among others, many of Jewish origin, settled here and worked in various areas of industry, communication and visual arts, contributing decisively to the modernization of these sectors in the 1940s.
At the end of that decade and during the following one, a unique moment was created for an intense cycle of industrialization and development of the city, which was strongly reflected in the country’s communications and visual arts. Three distinct but interconnected areas underwent profound transformations in this period. Firstly, visual communication, represented by illustrated magazines such as O Cruzeiro. Secondly, the plastic arts and visual arts circuit, marked by the inaugurations, in 1947 and 1948, of the São Paulo Museum of Art (Museu de Arte de São Paulo / MASP) and the Museum of Modern Art (Museu de Arte Moderna / MAM-SP), by the First São Paulo International Biennal, created in 1951, and by the development of the modern movement in photography, carried out within the scope of Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante. And thirdly, put at the service of a growing industrial sector, the graphic park and the publicity and advertising area associated with the printed media, the latter driven by the establishment of the Escola Superior de Propaganda, in 1951, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
Therefore, already from the beginning of 1940, Flieg works as an intern with German photographer Peter Scheier and at the end of the year he gets a job at the Foto Paramount studio, owned by Hungarian photographer Irene Lenthe. He then worked for two years (1941 to 1943) at the Companhia Lithographica Ypiranga, directed by Carlos Reichenbah, and then at the Indústria Gráfica L’ Niccolini (1943 to 1945), where he worked directly with Kurt Eppenstein, a German graphic designer from Leipzig and off-set pioneer in Brazil.
1945-2000
In 1945, he established himself autonomously as a professional photographer, starting a trajectory of more than forty years in the universe of industry, advertising, architecture, and arts photography. Throughout these four decades, in parallel with his work in the field of applied photography, he has carried out several other authorial projects, including portraits, landscape photography, the registration of historical cities in the countryside, such as Ouro Preto and Paraty, and made journalistic and documentary records of aspects of the city of São Paulo and of other locations he got to know in trips around the country.
He made the 1949 Pirelli calendar, all with photographs made with a Leica camera, in a language derived from the photography of Paul Wolff and the formal experimentation of European modernities from the 1930s and 1940s.
In other commissioned projects, such as the series of calendars he carried out for Brown Boveri from 1964, he develops each theme independently, building his view on the subject autonomously and editing the final content for presentation to the client. This project represented to Flieg a new work opportunity, insofar as he was able to freely choose themes and objects, something new and distinct from previous commissioned works. It is in this context that he performs the documentation on Ouro Preto, which will later be reworked in high contrast for the book by Lucia Machado de Almeida.
This authorial ambition, always present in his commissioned work and in projects of free choice, brought Flieg closer to a universe of artists, thinkers, technicians, entrepreneurs, who interacted with him in search of results applied to their activities and demands, while they were nourished by his spirit of perfection and permanent search for the quality.
Among these we can mention: Fred Jordan, Henri Maluf, Fritz Lessin, Curt Schulze, Noemia Cavalcanti, Bruno Giorgi, Djanira, Tarsila do Amaral, Felícia Leirner, Lina Bo Bardi e Pietro Maria Bardi, among others.
Flieg met Fred Jordan as the young art director of the Prado family advertising agency, and at his request, developed, in a pioneering way in Brazil, the photography of crystals and glass objects registered by transparency against illuminated backgrounds for the company Cristais Prado, with reference to the catalogs of Swedish company Orrefors. Jordan was compared by Olaf Leu — one of Europe’s most esteemed designers — to the instrumentalist who became the orchestra’s first violinist.
In this period Flieg also photographs the new stores and facilities of the company Cristais Prado, designed by the North American office of Raymond Loewy and Charles Bosworth. In 1947, Raymond Loewy implemented a design office in Brazil. Raymond Loewy Associates inaugurated its branch in the center of São Paulo, with clients from important industries of the time, including Cristais Prado. The office was directed by the Californian architect and designer Charles Sampson Bosworth and had a short life, ending its activities in the same year of 1947. In the 1950s, Bosworth returned definitively to Brazil where he settled, and developed numerous projects in industrial architecture.
At the same time, several Brazilian architects started activities related to furniture design. From the mid-1940s until the early 1960s, names such as Geraldo de Barros, José Zanine de Caldas and Lina Bo Bardi stood out. Many of them had links with the School of Architecture and Urbanism of São Paulo (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de São Paulo / FAU-USP) or with the Mackenzie School of Engineering.
At the same time, as a photographer of the First São Paulo International Biennal, organized by the Museum of Modern Art (Museu de Arte Moderna / MAM-SP), in 1951, he will photograph works and meet important names of international art, among them, for example, Swiss artist Max Bill, author of the sculpture Unidade Tripartida, winner of the first sculpture prize of that Biennial. In that same year Bill founded and directed the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, which would become a great reference for the training of Brazilian artists and designers in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Alexandre Wollner, Almir Mavignier and Mary Vieira.
Flieg works documenting interior projects and industrial stands of architect Henri Maluf made in the Ibirapuera pavilions on the fourth centenary of the city of São Paulo in 1954 and at the International Exhibition of Industry and Commerce at the São Cristóvão Pavilion, Rio de Janeiro, in 1961. In the 1960s, Flieg documents the construction of the Olivetti factory and photographs award-winning design products such as the Olivetti Logos 270 electronic calculator.
It is, therefore, from this confluence between industry, design, arts and architecture that the power of Hans Gunter Flieg’s photographic work emerges, built over forty years of permanent search for quality and developed in an environment marked by the Renaissance-like trajectory of post-war São Paulo, which largely benefited from the knowledge and know-how brought by immigrants who, like Flieg, left their countries of origin due to racial, religious and ideological persecutions. The city achieved its full consolidation in the 1980s and 1990s and became the great industrial metropolis of Latin America.
Flieg’s photography thus registers the intense growth of the city, while the city itself, in turn, configures, in the collective imagination of the country, the image and representation of the 20th century industrial metropolis.
In 1981, a retrospective of Flieg’s photographic archive was held at the Museum of Image and Sound (Museu da Imagem e do Som / MIS) in São Paulo and in 1993 a portfolio of his images were incorporated into the Pirelli/MASP collection in São Paulo.
2000-2023
Flieg’s work is incorporated into the collection of the Moreira Salles Institute in 2006. In 2010, Moreira Salles Institute produces and exhibits the Flieg-photographer exhibition in the cultural center of Rio de Janeiro. An adaptation, in a smaller version, of Flieg-photographer. Industry, design, advertising, architecture, and art in the work of Hans Gunter Flieg. Photographs from the Moreira Salles Institute collection is displayed at the Zoom gallery, within the scope of the 8th Paraty em Foco. In 2015, the exhibition, in full version, is exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo / MAC-USP).
In 2013, IMS held the exhibition Photographic Modernities: 1940-1964 at the Museum of Photography in Berlin. It was curated by Ludger Derenthal, coordinator of the Kunstbibliothek photography collection in Berlin, and Samuel Titan Jr., IMS’s cultural executive coordinator. It brought together the works of Flieg, José Medeiros, Marcel Gautherot and Thomaz Farkas. The show then went to Lisbon, Paris and Madrid.
In 2016, the exhibition Photographic Modernities: 1940-1964 is inaugurated at the Marc Ferrez Gallery of IMS Rio, on March 20, 2016, running until March 5, 2017. The following year, Photographic Modernities: 1940-1964 arrives on March17, 2018 at IMS Poços, where it runs until October 6.
On July 3, 2023, Hans Gunter Flieg turns 100 years old and on August 22, 2023 the exhibition Flieg. All that is solid is inaugurated at IMS Paulista.