A LONESOME FAIRYTALE
Dietmar Busse: Fairytales 1991-1999 at Amant, Brooklyn
[Editor’s Note: Rebecca Rose Cuomo called me in the summer and insisted I visit Amant, Brooklyn to see Dietmar Busse: Fairytales 1991-1999. ‘It’s for you,’ she said. The show, which I saw yesterday, reflected my childhood in the nineties of the New York fashion industry so clearly. There’s Mickey Boardman, and Susan Cianciolo and Erickson Beamon for Dior.1
Please enjoy Rebecca’s incredible piece below. — ME]
“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot,” Diane Arbus wrote in her monograph. Dietmar Busse — whose photography has often been compared to that of Arbus — has said: “I don’t photograph freaks, but people. Who is not a freak?”
Dietmar Busse: Fairytales 1991-1999, now in its final week at Amant in East Williamsburg, New York, is the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the United States. Curated by Tobi Meier, the show features intimate, idiosyncratic portraits of people Busse encountered throughout New York City during a decade of radical transformation.
On view through this Sunday, February 16th, Fairytales offers a quiet immersion — as if moving through the pages of a private photo album at architectural scale. It’s a spatiotemporal experience through a city that no longer exists, has become something else in time. Dietmar led me through the exhibition, recounting tender stories and memories crystallized in his vibrant polaroids — his personal journey across and within a supernova that was New York in the ‘90s. Let’s walk.
“Looking,” Ad Reinhardt said, “isn’t as easy as it looks.” But through his practice, when Dietmar Busse looks, people are seen.
The pictures in Fairytales that I find most salient are those micro-stories of strangers, friends, loved ones, passersby — when Busse’s camera served as catalyst for interpersonal connection. A mother with three children looks deep into the camera, looks through it, her lips ever-so-slightly curled upwards. She holds her youngest child in her arms, a baby girl whose strong and somewhat perplexed gaze meets the lens under her furrowed brow. To the woman’s right, her son — the eldest — crosses his arms below his chest. To the woman’s left, her middle child, a daughter, mimics her older brother’s pose as she watches him with the type of silent admiration younger siblings have for the ones born before them.
In a number of the photographs, there are folds, stains, scratches, micro-tears along the edges, incisions where thumb-tacks once held their place upon a wall. Most of these images were not conceived for viewing in a public space. They are deeply personal, private even. Busse’s work is unframed, textured and tactile in its unmediated materiality. Fairytales is a constellation of almost a decade of the artist’s image-making as human praxis. Animated by silent hopes and dreams, flashes of joy and prisms of contemplation, Busse’s Fairytales are lightning moments of people that gave New York a pulse.
Find LONESOME Nº1 at The Amant Bookstore alongside Dietmar Busse’s monograph Song for Birds and the Lonely.
This is the first in a trilogy of reviews by Rebecca Rose Cuomo for LONESOME on Amant’s Fall 2024 / Winter 2025 programming. Stay tuned for coverage of Jenna Bliss: Basic Cable and Loretta Fahrenholz: A Coin from Thin Air coming soon to lonesomepress.com.
Visit Amant this weekend, February 13-16, for your final chance to experience these shows. Amant is located at 306 and 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, NY. Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm.
Fantastic, love this work.
Looks great!