Düsseldorf – Photo exhibit

You know life is good when a field trip takes you to Germany. As castle students we get to skip one class period of each class once before travel break and once after for extended travel. It just so happens that the majority of my photo class decided to take the class off all at the same time, leaving us with only three students. So our professor decided to take us on a field trip.




We traveled to a photo exhibit in Düsseldorf of the photographer Michel Comte, a fashion and magazine photographer. He worked for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to doing journalistic and documentary work for the Red Cross.




It was interesting to see the work of a photographer who had originally done purely fashion photography for magazines do work for the Red Cross. The Red Cross photos were shocking and showed reality clearly hiding nothing, but as our professor pointed out the photographs were actually staged in the same way that the photos for Vanity Fair and Vogue had been, the people were posed, the lighting set, and everything made into a marketing piece so people would donate to the Red Cross. I thoroughly enjoyed the gallery and loved the fact that we went as a class so that I could really see the photos for what they were and discuss them.