Bettina Flitner
Bettina Flitner is a photographer and film maker from Cologne, Germany. Her experiences with film have had a strong influence on her photographical works. She was trained as a film editor at the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR) and she studied at the "Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie" in Berlin. Already her first films have received numerous awards. As a photographer Bettina Flitner is an autodidact who manages to combine several genres in a skillful way. She is known for her art that lies between documentary journalism and staged fiction.
She attracted attention for the first time with her "Report from No Man’s Land" - a photo series about people from East and West Germany during the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989.
From the beginning of the 1990s she went into public space with her works. Her portraits grew into larger than life photo sculptures, such as her widely acclaimed trilogy "My Enemy - My Monument - My Heart" from the years 1992-1995, with which she infiltrated the art scene and broke through its boundaries.
Most of the time her photo essays have a serial character and often Flitner works with a combination of text and pictures.
Women with visions
Her latest work „Women with visions“ focused on 60 female European personalities coming from politics, economy and society. For this project, Bettina Flitner traveled around Europe for several years. She sat in Miep Gries´ living room, who once hid Anne Frank and saved her diary. She visited the laboratory of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who was awarded with the Nobel Prize. She joined the actress Franka Potente in a ballet school in Berlin-Kreuzberg. She visited Marion Dönhoff right before her death in Blankenese. She went to the olive fields in Calabria with Baroness Cordopatri, who was threatened by the mafia. She took photos of the six bodyguards of the Dutch politician Ajaan Hirsi Ali in the dunes near Den Haag.
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