Beginning and end are in the garden. From here - from the shade of picturesque trees or from the silence of the tiny pond - from here our life once went out; and here it will return. At least that is what the old tales want; legend of Avalon or of Eden, of the green of the Hespherides or the far-off paradise: "There the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east," it says right at the beginning of Genesis. And in the 47 Sura of the Koran it is adorned: "Brooks with water tha…

It is the year 1969: In the French Church of St. Moritz, Herbert von Karajan, then Chief Conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducts Arthur Honegger's Symphony no. 2. The exact circumstances of the concert are not known. The only thing that remains is the silence. Robert Lebeck has sculpted them on a minimalist composition of light and shadow. But each before and after is cut off: only the genius and the great silence; the moment between two sentences, between two bars or two notes. …

Love loves small things. Love doesn't seek big pathos or emphasis. Love hides in the profane; in the shiny shoes in which one has journeyed or in the perfect fold of a beautiful dress. The really big things often lurk in the smallest of details. "I believe," the American poet Walt Whitman once wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars." It is a poetry of dignity and nuance. This is a credo about the interplay of all things and the reverberati…

When we depart, walking over the summer leaves and the meadows which confidently and piercingly surrendered to the sun, memories resonate in each of our steps. We leave regret and desire behind, while the future lurks ahead in the bushes. And this is only an image from a lost garden – made from a fabric, woven from flowers and freckles. The photographer Isa Marcelli, born in Algeria in 1958, has many such images in her work - images which appear like small flashbacks. They are reminisce…

There is no photography. There is always only the photograph which gazes back at the viewer. Sometimes with a careful, tentative and questioning look; sometimes with a brisk or hasty glance. But it always offers something: an invitation to brief conversations. The viewer always looks, and the photograph, full of curiosity, gazes back. As in 1966, when the German reportage photographer Robert Lebeck took a portrait of the former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer at his 90th birthday celebration …

Women are a major driving force of photography. No sooner had French pioneer Louis Daguerre introduced the media to the public in 1839 than it began to be used as a method to portray female beauty. It was American chemist John W. Draper who ushered women into photography with a portrait of his sister Dorothy. And ever since, the suspicion has been that a wooing Orpheus lurks behind the cold technology of the camera - an artist whose intentions are to captivate and seduce women with photographs. …