Under/Exposed, Stockholm Photography Festival,
Stockholm
Waterproof, Expo ‘98, Lisbon, Portugal
1999 Exploring Photography: From the Museum Collection,
National Film Center, The National Museum of Mod-
ern Art, Tokyo
Master Works, Master Photographers, Tokyo Metro-
politan Museum of Photography, Tokyo
Contemporary Photographic Art from Japan, Neuer Ber-
liner Kunstverein, Berlin
2003 Japon: un renouveau photographique,Ho ˆ tel de Sully,
Paris
Selected Works
The Map, 1965
The Japanese National Flag, Shinjuku, Tokyo—from The
Map Series, 1959–1965
Ludwig II no shiro(Castle of Ludwig II), 1979
Last Cosmology, 1979–1997
Nude, 1984
Car Maniac, 1995–1998
Eureka, 1999Further Reading
Attilio, Colombo, and Doniselli Isabella.Japanese Photo-
graphy: Today and its Origin.Bologna: Grafis Edizioni,
1979.
Kohtaro, Iizawa, and Kasahara Michiko.Objects, Faces and
Anti-Narratives: Rethinking Modernism.Tokyo:Metropo-
litan Museum of Photography, 1995.
Ryuichi, Kaneko, and Nakamura Hiromi.Zeitgeno ̈ssusche
Fotokunst aus Japan. Heidelberg: Umschau Braus, 1999.
Ryuichi, Kaneko and Iizawa Kohtaro.Illusion: Japanese
Photography. Stockholm: Riksutsta ̈llningar, 2001.
Tucker, Anne Wilkes.The History of Japanese Photogra-
phy. New Haven, CT, and Houston, TX: Yale Univer-
sity Press and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003.PETER KEETMAN
German
The terms ‘‘fotoform’’ and ‘‘subjective photogra-
phy’’ are well-known synonyms for West German
photography of the 1950s. Among the most enig-
matic representatives of this photographic style is
Peter Keetman, who influenced subsequent genera-
tions of photographers with his formally composed,
purist images.
Keetman was born on April 27, 1916, in Wupper-
tal-Elberfeld. His father, an enthusiastic amateur
photographer, gave the eight-year-old Keetman a
camera. In 1935, the father also sent him to study at
the Bavarian State Instructional Institute of Photo-
graphy, which today is the State Academy of Photo-
graphic Design in Munich.
In 1937, Keetman finished his studies with the
apprentice exam in commercial photography. He
worked in the studio of Gertrud Hesse in Duisburg,
Germany, then in 1939 he moved to Aachen and
joined the industrial photographer Carl-Heinz
Schmeck, who worked mainly for firms in heavy
industry. In 1940, Keetman was drafted for mili-
tary service and was severely wounded.
In 1947, he resumed his master’s studies with
Hanna Seewald in Munich at the State Instruc-
tional Institute of Photography. After completing
his master’s in 1948, with fellow student Wolfgang
Reisewitz, he audited a course taught by the
photographer and artist Adolf Lazi, who had just
established a private instructional institute of
photography in Stuttgart. In the context of an
exhibit calledDie Photographie 1948(Photogra-
phy 1948)—one of the very first photo exhibitions
in postwar Germany—Lazi also showed works
from Peter Keetman.
Repelled by the propagandistic use of photogra-
phy in the period of National Socialism, young
photographers, among them Keetman and Reise-
witz, as well as Siegfried Lauterwasser, Toni Schnei-
ders, Ludwig Windstosser, and their mentor Otto
Steinert, formed the group fotoform; they created a
community of shared interests, planned group exhi-
bits, and participated together in other exhibits.
The collective goal of the group’s members was
not to make photography that served the repre-
sented object—in the sense of an objective reflection
of reality—but to reorient photography toward the
creative possibilities of the medium and toward the
creation of an inherently valued art product.
The following year the young group presented
works at the first Photo-Kino exhibition in Co-KEETMAN, PETER