"In Love with Photography" is the title of the exhibition opening on Thursday, February 5th at 7 p.m. at the Freelens Gallery in Hamburg. The Freelens Gallery presents portraits by photographer and longtime Freelens member Volker Hinz (†18.10.2019), who spent decades meeting and photographing some of the most influential photographers in the history of photography – both at official events and in quiet, private moments. The works offer an immediate, often surprisingly intimate view of the people behind the iconic images and paint a vivid panorama of photography as art, craft, and philosophy.

"In Love with Photography" invites us to see photographic history through an unexpected lens: not the legendary images themselves, but the visionaries who created them. Over decades, Volker Hinz documented some of photography's greatest practitioners – among them Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, Alfred Eisenstaedt, F. C. Gundlach, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton, Mary Ellen Mark, Irving Penn, Sebastião Salgado, Ruth Bernhard, and Joel-Peter Witkin. What emerges is a powerful series of encounters – captured both in formal settings and unguarded moments. Hinz's portraits transcend celebrity; they reveal character, conviction, and individuality. They're ultimately about intimacy – about what happens when the eye behind the camera becomes the subject.

The exhibited works are drawn from the eponymous photo book "In Love with Photography". In the foreword, Peter-Matthias Gaede writes: "Over the decades, Volker Hinz didn't collect comprehensiveness, but resonance: respect, curiosity, and a passion for the image. This is precisely what gives these portraits their special quality – concentrated, intimate, irreverent, and tender all at once. Volker Hinz takes the masters of his craft down from their pedestals and places them on the ground – not to expose them, but to make them approachable."

The opening will be introduced by Peter-Matthias Gaede and Henriette Väth-Hinz. The exhibition is realized with generous support from art historian and author Henriette Väth-Hinz.

www.freelens.com