Dietmar Busse: Fairytales 1991-1999 at Amant
Dietmar Busse, Show Girls in Las Vegas for The New York Times, 1995. Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot,” Diane Arbus wrote in her monograph.1 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 Sunday, February 16 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.
Dietmar Busse, Three Friends on Greenwich Avenue, 1996. Polaroid. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
Cat astrologer Genia Wennerstrom points with conviction to a Libra cat illustrated on a pie chart with all twelve signs. She is seated at a table with copies of her 32-page hardcover book Cat Horoscopes: For Each of Your Cat’s Nine Lives (Cat Astrologer, 1997). Companions on the street downtown, late spring when the weather was warm — young and fierce, determined — imbuing the image with the promise of summer’s enchantment (Three Friends on Greenwich Avenue, 1996). A man sits on a sofa, holding a lit cigarette in his right hand while leaning his left side against the backrest, his body visibly touched by the effects of HIV (My Friend Charlie,1996). “Looking,” Ad Reinhardt said, “isn’t as easy as it looks.” But through his practice, when Dietmar Busse looks, people are seen.
Dietmar Busse, My Friend Charlie,, 1996. Polaroid. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
Born and raised on a small farm outside a tiny village in northern Germany, Busse arrived in New York in 1991 by way of Madrid via Berlin. He soon found work at Industria Superstudio — a commercial rental studio, new at the time, where Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Annie Leibowitz, and other greats held photoshoots. Busse used Industria’s Polaroid 600SE to take his own pictures on the New York streets.
Busse’s photographs on view in Fairytales are infused with the sense of curiosity — of wonder, respect, appreciation, and soft delight one has throughout early encounters with new people in a new and different place. Busse made these images in transit around New York, traveling mostly by bike from Brighton Beach to the Upper East Side, Harlem to Coney Island, everywhere in between. Shooting polaroids on the fly as doubles, Busse left one copy with the people he photographed and kept the other in his pocket. For the artist, his camera served as a threshold — a point of entry into spaces and stories of people’s inner worlds. “I would ask if I could take their picture in exchange for a Polaroid. When people agreed, these spontaneous photo sessions lasted a few minutes only, but sometimes they took longer and people would tell me their stories, or occasionally even invite me to visit and photograph them in their homes,” Busse describes. Like Lucia, a transgender lady with long, curly black hair gathered on the top of her head by a white bow, who elegantly sits with her left hand against her hip, right arm crossed over her bent legs (Lucia in her Apartment on 9th Street, 1995).
Dietmar Busse, Lucia in her Apartment on 9th St.,, 1995. Polaroid. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
The artist remembers the warmth of this encounter, the trust Lucia showed by inviting him, then a stranger, into her home. Dietmar mentioned that all of Lucia’s furniture was covered with plastic slipcovers — the couch, the bed, tables, and chairs. It’s a decorative style popular among many immigrant families, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In my case, as an Italian-American, this resonates2. Both my grandmothers had plastic slipcovers on stuff around their houses. We didn’t have much where we came from. We wanted to protect our things, we wanted to keep them nice.
“Having a camera back then was still something special,” Busse recalls. Lucia also kept a Christmas tree and yuletide décor in her apartment all year-round — symbolic embodiments of joy and generosity for her, probably. Something magic. Busse and Lucia became very friendly. He used his camera as a conduit for connection.
Dietmar Busse, Asian Girls on Sofa, 1995. Archival Pigment Print. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
As much as Fairytales is a visual essay of New York in the ‘90s, it’s also a self-portrait of an artist guided by sensitivity and instinct. A fixture in the downtown scene, Busse built a career as a fashion photographer. His photography has graced the covers and pages of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Interview, Paper Magazine, Visionaire, IT, Surface, and many more. Busse shot portraits of Kara Walker, Pedro Almodóvar, Rossy de Palma, Quentin Crisp, and lots of other local legends. The exhibition at Amant encompasses elements from this dimension of his practice: Busse’s friend Ami Goodheart modeling a Yves Saint Laurent dress from the Met Museum collection in a photo commissioned for the publication Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Creation3; showgirls in Las Vegas for the New York Times Magazine (1995);4 Steve McQueen for Harpers Bazaar (1997); Amy Wesson for Vogue España (1997).
Dietmar Busse, Amy Wesson Backstage, 1997. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
I perceive a distinct rapport between the photographer and the seasoned fashion model, and the one reflected in Two Girls in a Harlem Beauty Shop (1996). Black girls in the process of getting their hair done, clips separating parts of their hair as they get braided, standing chest-to-chest, hands-on-hips in a striking symmetrical composition. The young women look Busse in the eye behind the camera. There’s comfort and chemistry between them; they seem like good friends. I imagine they chose this pose. In the picture for Vogue España. Amy Wesson is also getting her hair done by two stylists (and the outstretched hand of a third) who appear alongside her in the photograph, attentively at work. Amy’s eyes are nearly closed as she gazes down to the far-left corner, eyelids refracting light from pigmented eyeshadow. With painted lips ajar, she leans slightly forward, emphasizing her long, slender neck and prominent collarbone. These behind-the-scenes moments capture rituals of feminine beauty practices in different atmospheres with different implications, different moods. Two Girls in a Harlem Beauty Shop was reproduced inVisionaire’s 1997 Beauty Issue.
Dietmar Busse, Two Girls in a Harlem Beauty Shop, 1996. Polaroid. Installation shot at Amant by Rebecca Rose Cuomo. Courtesy Dietmar Busse, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
Busse excelled as an award-winning, sought-after fashion photographer — his commissioned works express the same spontaneity, gentle interest, subtle eccentricities and interiority that his artistic street photography had — but his images seem to convey he was more comfortable with the latter. “After some time I got overwhelmed by the demands of the commercial world. It became less about storytelling and more and more about selling a product.”
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 (Mother with Children in Harlem , 1995). Many families have photos like this — we have a few of me looking at my older cousin Suzanne that way, some of my little brothers and sister looking at me with that very specific, fleeting flavor of focused esteem.
Dietmar Busse, Mother with Children in Harlem, 1995. Polaroid. Courtesy the artist, Amant, and Fierman, New York.
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.
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Find LONESOME Nº1 at The Amant Bookstore alongside Dietmar Busse’s monograph Song for Birds and the Lonely.
This is the first chapter in a trilogy of reviews by Rebecca Rose Cuomo for LONESOME of Amant’s Fall 2024 / Winter 2025 programming. Stay tuned for coverage of Jenna Bliss: Basic Cable and Loretta Fahrenholz: A Coin from Thin Air.
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.
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1 Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, 2011
2 Us from the South, with our nouveau-Baroque furnishings that remind us of the architecture of Napoli, her churches and palazzi.
3 Published by International Festival of Fashion Photography, 1998.
4 Awarded Picture of the Year by American Photo
