Die Erinnerung ist oft das Schönste

Few movie stars have been the object of as many different and contradictory photographs as Romy Schneider. She was captured on film thousands of times, yet she always remained enigmatic. Particularly valuable photographs are those—many never before published—taken by nine internationally renowned photographers: Werner Bokelberg, Peter Brüchmann, Roger Fritz, F. C. Gundlach, Helga Kneidl, Robert Lebeck, Herbert List, Will McBride, and Max Scheler. Some only met Romy once—List, for instance, captured her as a teenager in previously unpublished pictures shot in 1954. Others—like Lebeck, who took arresting, personal pictures of her from the fifties until just before her death—accompanied her throughout her life. Romy as a young girl, as her film characters, next to Alain Delon, pensively embracing her children, seemingly unobserved during an ordinary day, deliberately posing or in costume, happy or contemplative, seductively beautiful or vulnerable: these snapshots keep Romy’s myth alive and are at the same time powerful reflections on impermanence. Exhibition schedule: Opelvillen Rüsselsheim, September 17–December 28, 2008 · Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, February 6–April 13, 2009