Roger Fritz’s book “Boulevard of Vanities”

by time news

Roger Fritz knew almost everyone – and it is all the more regrettable that almost no one knows him today, outside of Munich at least, outside of those circles where one can still remember how violently the celebrations used to be, in Schwabing, in Rome or on the Riviera. When Roger Fritz died last fall, there were hardly any major obituaries. It wasn’t because he didn’t have enough talent for such an honor. Rather, it was because Roger Fritz had too many talents as a photographer, as an actor, and as a film and television director. Apparently he lacked only one talent, the talent to be unhappy with himself. And to bring to completion in an artistic work everything that didn’t succeed in life.

No, Roger Fritz has apparently always lived well: when he played the medium-sized roles intended for handsome men like himself in films by Visconti, Peckinpah or Fassbinder. When he directed the films “Girls, Girls” and “Girls with Violence”, appropriately starring his wife Helga Anders; Films that had style, stubbornness and presence of mind, that won awards and yet followed little.

Physically abusive and vulgar

But perhaps it was a much better life when he, who once co-founded the legendary magazine “Twen”, then traveled the world for Munich and Hamburg magazines and photographed the people and the scenes that the public or the editors were interested in at the time interested. Shortly before his death, Fritz compiled a selection of these photos for a book he called Vanity Boulevard. The title is good, but doesn’t get to the heart of the matter – if only because the view goes in the other direction. What Fritz is showing there is much less the self-portrayal of the portrayed; it is more of a Time.news of curiosity, a record of attention. Fritz photographed on behalf of the public, not the celebrities.

Alain Delon, Luchino Visconti, Romy Schneider, Paris 1961





picture series



With the instinct for glamour
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Photographs by Roger Fritz

He photographed Romy Schneider and Franz Josef Strauss, Luchino Visconti and Dolly Dollar, Markus Söder, Hans Werner Henze and Lisa Lyon. The usual hierarchies of high and popular culture, politics, bohemian, TV celebrities are abolished. Which does not result in indifference, but quite the opposite, often unexpected new perspectives. Franz Josef Strauss, for example, at the Salzburg Festival, in a white dinner jacket and Ray-Ban sunglasses, next to his bodyguards in dark suits: you think you can see the size and the danger that this man poses. And one trusts him that he could simply take on the leading role himself in an expensive film adaptation of his life.

At the Sports Ball in Mainz in 1990, Fritz photographed the chancellor and the defense minister, Helmut Kohl and Manfred Wörner. Both are wearing tuxedos, and Helmut Kohl has his fingers on Wörner’s idiosyncratic bow tie, as if checking to see if Wörner tied it himself. In this picture, better than in any Bundestag or state visit photo, you can see how Kohl staged his power: physically invasive, indecent, vulgar.

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