Yet Photokina's importance exists on two levels. First, of course, it has long served as the prime international showcase and launching pad for the photo industry -- specifically, for the makers of cameras, lenses, papers, chemistry, and the other equipment of photography. As such, it's a nexus for the entire multi-billion-dollar global traffic in photographic tools, materials, and processes, on a scale unparallelled by any comparable exposition in the U.S. or elsewhere, roughly equivalent to the Frankfurt Book Fair in its eminence.
The second level of Photokina's influence, hardly recognized and rarely acknowledged, manifests itself in the now-huge and still-burgeoning network of international photography festivals. These festivals, unlike Photokina, take the theater and dance and music festival as their model; they're gathering places for photographers and their audiences, not manufacterers' expos, and while they often enjoy photo-industry sponsorship they place no emphasis on photo products. However, the inspiration for these photo festivals -- of which the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie (R.I.P.) in Arles, France, founded in 1969, represents the prototype -- came at least in part from the photo-exhibition component of Photokina ("Photokina-Bilderschau") initiated by L. Fritz Gruber. Gruber, a native of Cologne who worked with Photokina in various capacities from 1949 on, is an internationally known and respected historian, curator, and collector of photography who organized hundreds of photography exhibits held in conjunction with Photokina from 1950 through 1980.
In the early 1980s Photokina abandoned this exhibition component to concentrate on its trade-fair aspect; so, in 1983, a group including Gruber, the Cologne museum curator Dr. Reinhold Mi§elbeck, representatives of the cultural office of the city of Cologne and the DGPh (German Society for Photography), and various gallery owners founded the "Internationale Fotoszene Kšln." Biennially until 1990, in conjunction with Photokina, this Fotoszene project coordinated photo exhibitions in galleries, cultural institutions, and artists' ateliers, accompanied by a catalogue. In 1990 this event turned into an independent annual festival for photography held each September/October /November. The year 2000 marked the 14th Internationale Fotoszene Kšln, involving 91 photography shows and related events.
In addition to exemplifying the synergistic possibility of a multi-exhibition extravaganza, and thereby anticipating and stimulating the emergence of the vital photo-festival phenomenon, the Photokina exhibition project and its successor, Internationale Fotoszene Kšln, inevitably brought the work of many New York photographers to Cologne -- often accompanied by the photographers themselves. And, in turn, these events have introduced the work of many Cologne-based photographers to Photokina's and Fotoszene Kšln's international audience, which includes numerous people in various branches of photography from New York City. That has surely helped in getting photography from Cologne into the New York City gallery/museum/publishing circuit.
Certainly the movers and shakers in photography from both cities -- curators, collectors, critics, historians, gallerists, and others -- know each other, and each other's projects and institutions, and travel regularly between these two urban centers. In part as a result of this, the New York photo cognoscenti have now encountered the work not only of such historic Cologne photographers as August Sander and Karl-Heinz Chargesheimer but also that of contemporary figures like Candida Hšfer, JŸrgen Klauke, Astrid Klein, Sigmar Polke, Anna Blume, and Werner Mantz -- all of whom have shown in New York, though some of their work finds itself categorized as photography, some as what's now called "photo-based art" -- and also of course the painter Gerhard Richter and other figures whose art incorporates or refers to elements of what we might call the photographic.
As a sophisticated art center, Cologne in turn has over the years exhibited the imagery of many of the classic New York photographers of the early and mid-twentieth century -- Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, Weegee, and many more. But the Cologne audience is also familiar with some New York photographers who -- like Geoffrey Forrest and Philip Pocock -- have relocated to Cologne from New York, becoming better-known there than they are in their own native land. And, if they haven't met them in the flesh, photography fans from Cologne have also encountered the work of the still-active older generation of New York photographers -- legends of documentary photography like Gordon Parks, Bruce Davidson, Benedict J. Fernandez, Mary Ellen Mark; experimenters like Ralph Gibson, John Coplans and Duane Michals -- and mid-career New York figures like the autobiographer Nan Goldin, the photogrammatist Adam Fuss, the photo-printmaker Jack Sal, and the directorial satirists Sandy Skoglund and Les Krims.
As in Cologne, so in New York: the mid-career and younger figures -- such as those already named and others like Laurie Simmons, Andres Serrano, Ellen Brooks, Richard Prince, Ann Mandelbaum, Cindy Sherman, Alvin Booth -- often find their work moving between the poles of photography and "photo-based art," an apposition that's activated and energized the international art scene at least since the heyday of surrealism, and certainly since the mixed-media explosion of Pop Art in the Sixties, when Warhol, Rauschenberg, and others flung open the doors to the full integration of photographic images with other materials in works of art. Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras, and countless other artists since have made photographs, painted on photographs, derived paintings from photographs, and otherwise adapted the medium of photography to their own ends.
And what of this New York-Cologne photography connection in the new century? It seems likely not only to continue but to expand. The interrelationships between the photo festivals like Fotoszene Kšln, the photo museums (such as New York's International Center of Photography), the art museums with significant commitments to photography and photo-based art (New York's Museum of Modern Art pioneered this relation to photography in the 1930s; Cologne, like many cities today, has its own contemporary art institution, the Ludwig Museum, with a notable photo collection program), the galleries specializing in photography or including photography and "photo-based art" in their offerings, the auctions and collectors and publishing houses -- these interwoven projects have all become truly internationalized, if not quite globalized.
Add to this the dissemination of photographic images and information about images and their makers and related events that the internet makes possible, and the emergence of such Web technologies as streaming audio and video, and the possiblities for a linkage between the two metropolises that functions in real time become enticing. It seems reasonable to propose that, at the present moment, the Cologne photo scene is more aware of the New York photo scene than vice versa. Create a genuine web-based dialogue between the two, however, by setting up an ongoing, interactive Fotoszene Kšln-New York website with video conferencing, chat rooms, online exhibits, real-time lectures and symposia, and Cologne could strengthen that connection and make it more of a two-way street.
Meanwhile, let's not forget the fact that both cities are among the world's major economic engines. That will also facilitate the exchange of art -- because, at the turn of the 21st century, the connection between high finance and almost all contemporary art activity has become clearer and more direct than at any time since the Renaissance. So what we might call moneybridge, or the art-money-art connection in photography, will probably remain an equivalent symbiosis for a very long time.
