Anthony Luke's not-just-another-photoblog Blog: Photographer Profile ~ F.C. Gundlach

F.C. Gundlach was born in 1926 in Heinebach, Germany. Gundlach got his first camera, an Agfa-Box, in 1938. After his release from an American POW camp, he studied photography in Kassel between 1946 and 1949. His first freelance publications were theatre and film reports for different magazines like Stern, Quick, and Revue. In 1953 he began to specialize in fashion photography in a journalistic style for the Hamburg-based magazine Film und Frau, Elegante Welt and Annabelle which established him as one of Germany’s most important fashion photographers. During that time, he documented the fashion of Berlin designers, Paris haute couture, as well as portraits and fashion shots of international film stars.

From his early freelance days until late into the 1950s, Gundlach used a Rolleiflex camera with a built-in 75mm lens. For studio-made cover shots, he used a Linhof large image camera. From 1956 on, he used Hasselblads with interchangeable lenses for images in 6x6cm format, achieving greater variation of perspective and composition. From the mid-1950s, he also used Leica, a small 35mm rangefinder with a wide-angle lens, which was later replaced by Nikon. Gundlach explained his overall lens preference as: “28mm was my lens. Because one could get closer, one could get a steeper perspective and a sharper depth of field, even with multiple image levels,”

“I have always looked at limitations as challenges,

not as oppositions.”

~ F.C Gundlach