Billy & Hells
\n<\/b>Anke Linz (born 1965 in N\u00fcrnberg) and Andreas Oettinger (born 1963 in Munich) joined as a photographer-couple in the mid 1980\u2019s under the name Billy & Hells.\u00a0 Their works are just as inspired by old paintings as by classical portrait photography.\u00a0 The picture language varies depending on the series, yet every photo is an unmistakable part of their total work of art.\u00a0 At times, the models will coyly look to the side or the ground, then again outright and directly at the camera. Sometimes you can see the proverbially unadorned truth, then at another time, the makeup is hard to beat in its dramatics.\u00a0 One element is present in (nearly) all of Billy & Hells photographs though: The silence, the earnestness. And yet the pictures reveal a subtle sense of humour.<\/p>\n
The two play with familiar images in a virtuosic way.\u00a0 Clich\u00e9s like that of the nurse sporting a determined look, that of the strict teacher, or the gracious mother, the cool looking sailor or the casual cowboy are taken out of their frame of reference and placed into an entirely new context.\u00a0 Not one detail is left to chance, not the colour, the clothing nor the orchestration of the photograph.<\/p>\n
Karl E. Johnson wrote about their series \u201cBlue Moon\u201d in Eyemazing magazine, \u201cThe rich m\u00e9lange of costumes, personalities, and stylistic elements (…) are as original as un-cinematic, the women as mysterious as accessible, and the visual details as ornamental as structurally essential.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pictures of Billy & Hells, who have been living in Berlin since the year 2000, have been shown in Tokyo, London, in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles.\u00a0 In 2007, they received the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize of the National Gallery of London, an important moment for their international break-through.\u00a0 The couple\u2019s name apparently came from the English pronunciation of the word \u201cBillighotels.\u201d\u00a0 If the legend is true, it delightfully shows the connection between clich\u00e9, unadorned reality and joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-378","ausstellungen","type-ausstellungen","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atelierjungwirth.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ausstellungen\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atelierjungwirth.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ausstellungen"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atelierjungwirth.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ausstellungen"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.atelierjungwirth.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ausstellungen\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atelierjungwirth.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}