"Drei springende Mädchen in der Wiese"

Archive number 76/34

gelatin silver print on baryta

stamp on verso

So far, Kilian's fame has been based primarily on his captivating photos of the Stuttgart Ballet, which went around the world during the Cranko era. But it was not only in the 1960s and 1970s that his work showed a brilliant talent for translating movement into photographic snapshots. A dreamlike dance picture from the 1930s: Two girls hover over a meadow of flowers in a leap, while a third balances on her hands in a somersault. All three are immortalized in the happy moment when gravity seems to have been suspended. The formal perfection of this photograph is only apparent at second glance, so infectious is its carefree joie de vivre.
In 1938, the year the photo was taken, it expressed a longing, but certainly not the young photographer's state of mind. He reluctantly returned from self-imposed exile to National Socialist Germany. Born in Ludwigshafen on Lake Constance in 1909, he had completed his photographic training in Switzerland in 1931. Kilian would have preferred to become a cameraman or pilot, but there was no money for that. He worked for a photo company in Lucerne and for a photo studio in Naples, and was a tour guide and camera assistant in Paris during the 1937 Paris World's Fair until his work permit was revoked.
(from: Michael Bienert, Subjektiv hinterm Objektiv. Der Fotograf Hannes Kilian im Berliner Martin-Gropius-Bau, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 6.4.2009)