"Rheinische Landschaft"

gelatin silver print on Agfa-Brovira paper

signed, dated and stamped on verso

In 1949, Keetman was one of the founders of the fotoform group, whose experimental, graphically incisive works echoed the photographic avant-garde of the 1920s. Keetman knew how to combine the influence that the “New Photographers” of the Weimar period had on him with his own individual perception of the reality that surrounded him and to translate it into a new, contemporary aesthetic. During his photographic activity, which spanned several decades, he focused his gaze on recurring subjects. He was interested in visually appealing phenomena that nature and the world of things have to offer: the transparency of a drop of water, the diffuse smoke of a cigarette, condensation in which the light refracts, crystalline ice formations, reflections, steam and fog. Through the lens of his camera, he isolated these optical phenomena and translated them into images of austere, graphic beauty. “We are surrounded – whether we take note of it or not – by a world full of lawful wonders” Peter Keetman recorded in later years. To make these wonders visible was what he saw as his task as a photographer.
(Julian Sander Galerie)

Time and again, however, when looking at Gerd Sander’s collection, we notice the great role model who had shaped Peter Keetman’s photographic work over several decades: Albert Renger-Patzsch. The two earliest photographs by Keetman in Sander’s collection [note: the photograph is from the Gerd Sander Collection.], the Rhenish Landscape of 1937 and another depiction of a landscape from the late 1930s, show precisely those features of composition that characterise Renger-Patzsch’s landscape photographs in the New Objectivity movement: trees, hedges, freshly mown hay laid out in strips or stacked in bales, and linear railway tracks – all of them are treated as visual elements that add structure to the two-dimensional space of the photograph.
(Maren Klinge, from: Galerie Julian Sander, Keetmann. Gerd Sander Collection, 2023)