Herbert Tobias was a remarkable photographer, but an artist above all else. He used photography as an outlet for his desires and obsessions. His concern was not to fix visible reality using the camera, but to convey inner images and existential feelings, or to touch them in the viewer. The intensity with which Tobias staged the world and gave expression to his feeling for life stili comes across, even today. It lends his photographs an immediacy that is still tangible; a presence capable of transcending time.
The artistic estate of Herbert Tobias is among the most important materials held by the Photographic Collection of the Berlinische Galerie. With around 150 exhibits, the artist's impressive work will be presented in all its variety for the first time: beginning with the photographs Tobias took as a 19-year old soldier on the eastern front, including images from Paris and from his work in the Berlin years, and leading up to the erotic photographs of men that - in varying intensity - appear in all periods of his work.
