THE ICON INTERVIEW: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BURAT
I first met Wolfgang Burat when he came to Karachi for a talk titled ‘Being there — punk as photography’ held at the Goethe Institut a few months ago. Burat is a German photographer and co-founder of the cult German music magazine Spex. From 1980 to the early 1990s he documented the music scene around him, including coverage of artists from both Germany and abroad. His work is considered relevant for social and music history, pop theory and art history.
A selection of his work was also exhibited at the Amin Gulgee Gallery in a retrospective titled Brilliant Dillentantes. His photos, often showing bands performing at very small venues or mingling with the crowd and, with there being no formal separation of space between the performer and the attendees, were oddly reminiscent of what the underground music scene looked like in Pakistan just under a decade ago. German punk rock in the 1980s was the alternative music scene. The rockers were rebels of their time and wanted to express what it meant to be ‘free.’ And they had a special disdain for musicians they considered mainstream.
Speaking about the punk rockers themselves, Burat laughed that “It was never important to get famous. It was important to do something interesting. And it’s not very interesting to make money.”
Documenting the ‘alternative’ music scene of Germany in the 1980s and 1990s has not prepared photographer Wolfgang Burat for the chaos of Karachi
According to Burat, photographing that with a film or analog camera was tricky. “You never know how the photograph is going to turn out,” he said. “It was always a risk if it came out shitty. Many times, when I looked at it, I thought I had failed, but nowadays when I look at my old photos, I realise I did not fail.”
Showing a black and white photo which showed an office with stacks of paper and publications strewn about, Burat mentioned that that was one of the offices at Spex magazine. “The thing is we did it all on our own,” he added talking about the struggle of maintaining a publication focused on documenting the alternative culture in Germany. “We were very proud of that. The paper didn’t make a lot of money.”
Later, over lunch at a local restaurant, Burat showed me one of the several books that have been published showcasing his work. Thumbing through the book, I was surprised, intrigued and awed to see that several well-known non-German artists from ‘back in the day’ were also a part of the book. Of course, I wanted to know all about how he ended up photographing some of them.