Ingeborg Gerdes — her photos showed the soul of the West
When Ingeborg Gerdes first walked into the San Francisco Art Institute, she was a Germaneducated economist who had driven across the country and was looking for a place to learn how to develop the rolls of film she’d taken along the way.
By the time she came back out of the Art Institute in 1970, with a master of fine arts degree, she was on her way to becoming an influential, if lesser known, documentary photographer. Just five years after earning her MFA, Gerdes was featured alongside the likes of Imogen Cunningham and Diane Arbus in “Women Photographers: A Historical Survey” exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Gerdes never stopped venturing, mostly in a Toyota pickup truck, either to mingle with the rail birds at the racetrack or out into the barren landscape of the West. She taught photography for two decades at UC Santa Cruz. She was still working when she died June 20 in her sleep at her home in Emeryville. She was 81, and preparing for a major exhibition next year at the prestigious Blue Sky Gallery in Portland.
The cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, according to her sister, Birgitta Hicks of Berlin.
“Ingeborg was one of those photographers that did not have all the name recognition in the wider realm, but she had this European view and was in the conversation as it started building over the last 40 or 50 years,” said Thom Sempere, former executive editor at PhotoAlliance. “To make a career out of just walking the streets with your camera when there isn’t a marketplace for that is remarkable. She had a view that she steadfastly kept to.”
Gerdes’ view was due largely to a weak left eye, the one that captured the big picture while her stronger right eye was capturing the little one through the viewfinder.
“She used to say, ‘I see the world through my bad eye,’ ” recalled her exhusband Hartmut Gerdes, a retired San Francisco urban designer. “She’d say, ‘I can see a larger context. I’m not carried away by the details.’ I always found that fascinating. She could look at the world and see it deeper.”
Ingeborg Klein was born into Hitler’s Third Reich, on July 20, 1938, in Merseburg, Germany. Her father was a judge, and during World War II, the family lived in Stade, a small town near Hamburg.
According to her sister Hicks, “there were bombings, and many nights spent in the shelter, but still she’d say she had a protected childhood.”
She earned her degree in economics at the Heidelberg University in 1964, the same year she and Hartmut Gerdes were married. He had a scholarship to study urban design at the University of Pennsylvania, which brought them to Philadelphia.
She got a job in the campus education library and bought a cheap 35mm camera to give herself something to do in her spare time. Completely selftaught, “she fell in love with Philadelphia by looking at it through her lens,” Hartmut said.
In 1967, they bought an old Peugeot and took off in search of America. By the time they reached San Francisco two months later, she had a bag full of rolls. They took a cottage on Russian Hill and planned to stay one year before returning to Germany. That plan was upended when she found the Art Institute in her neighborhood.
Eventually, she “left North Beach because it was too beautiful. It was too much of a postcard,” Hartmut said. “Ingeborg was not interested in pretty pictures. She was interested in exploring the soul of the countryside and its people.”
She found these in places like Golden Gate Fields in Albany, then farther and farther from her Oakland home. She had a deep empathy for barren landscapes. She was not a portrait photographer, but her images often included the honest stare of her subjects.
In many ways, Gerdes was a female version of Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer who captured midcentury American melancholia.
“Ingeborg came to America as a German citizen, and that helped her to see things in a way that nobody else could,” said Owen Gump, a fine arts photographer in Fairfax.
“She was fascinated by, yet skeptical and critical of, America. That perspective helped her a lot with her work.”
One thing that separated her from Frank was success in publishing. His 1959 book “The Americans,” is one of the most successful photography books ever printed. Gerdes never enjoyed that success because she could not find a publisher.
“We have a lot of solid work that goes unappreciated that is very insightful about time and place,” said legendary artist Linda Connor, who met Gerdes at SFAI in 1969, one year before Gerdes made her solo debut in the the school’s Diego Rivera Gallery. “Ingeborg was frustrated that she couldn’t get a book published and that her work wasn’t more recognized, but she kept doing it,” Connor said. “That’s where the grit comes in.”
Gerdes is widely collected by major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, SFMOMA Art, Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Portland Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum.
She earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and had solo exhibitions in galleries from Tokyo to Berlin. Her most recent San Francisco exhibition was in the group show “Westward: Ten Female Photographers Documenting and Depicting the West,” at San Francisco City Hall in 20182019.
“We could not have had that show without Ingeborg Gerdes because of her singular vision and her way of documenting the world around her,” said Ann Jastrab, who curated that show and is now executive director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel.
Jastrab also is consulting on the upcoming show in Oregon, for which Gerdes was scanning her archive, even on the day she died.
“Every day she posted a new photograph on Facebook that was the most extraordinary image you’d ever seen,” Jastrab said. “She was tireless and had so much left to do.”