Curator's Tour

In celebration of Walter Schels’s ninetieth birthday, C/O Berlin and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation presents the photographer’s first retrospective in Berlin. With more than three hundred works, the exhibition offers new insights into his oeuvre, which spans nearly seven decades. The exhibition brings together key series and focuses on an overlooked part of Schels’s oeuvre that consists of a large body of experimental works and transformatory approaches that have shaped Schels’s photographic practice. This new discovery will cast the photographer in new light. The works in the exhibition were selected during a review of several thousand prints from the photographer’s archive, which is kept and made accessible by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation.

Join guest curator Franziska Mecklenburg on a Curator’s Tour of the retrospective and learn fascinating background information about Schels’ extensive body of work.

Franziska Mecklenburg is an art historian and photography enthusiast. Since 2011, she has worked at the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, initially focusing on the archive of photographer Leonore Mau. Today, she is responsible for the F.C. Gundlach Collection and for the scholarly management of a continuously growing number of photographic estates and archives. She has curated exhibitions and authored numerous essays on monographic and collection-related topics from the foundation’s holdings, most recently for Schaut her! Toni Schneiders (2020), Dirk Reinartz. Fotografieren was ist (2024), F.C. Gundlach fotografiert Maris (2025), and F.C. Gundlach. You’ll Never Watch Alone (2026).