“It is speechless, silent, serious, ceaseless and lonely work along the great silence of the unshaded land.” (James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new large-scale, black and white portraits by German photographer Ingar Krauss.

“Seasonal workers who work as harvest hands in foreign countries have a long tradition. This form of migration existed throughout the world long before the age of globalization. In Europe workers migrate from East to West and from South to North. Today most of the seasonal workers have to travel farther to get to their working places. There are more than 300,000 migrant workers in Germany every year. A short time ago most of the workers were arriving from Poland but in the last few years more and more people have come from farther regions of Eastern Europe.

The seasonal workers consist of men and women, young and old, and sometimes entire families. They are people from different social levels and backgrounds. For months they live in temporary shacks with double-decker beds, working seven days a week with little or no contact with local Germans. Most of them do not speak German. Since there are not enough Germans who are willing to do the physical work for such little pay, the seasonal workers are a necessity to the German farmers. The whole harvest depends on those men and women from abroad. Every year thousands of harvest hands come and go like birds of passage. The portraits of migrant seasonal workers show the internal dynamics of a recent migration. They have traveled long distances to work in Germany. The photographs are taken in the fields or in the evening in front of their shacks. They are the people who facilitate our affluent society and who contribute to it in a fundamental way.”

A self-taught photographer, Ingar Krauss started to exhibit his photographs in 2001, gaining immediate international recognition. Birds of Passage is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Marvelli Gallery. In September 2005, Hatje Cantz Verlag published his first monograph Ingar Krauss: Portraits with an essay by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler and introduction by Vince Aletti. His work was included in important group shows: Adoleszenz, Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna, Austria; Making Faces: The Death Of The Portrait, Musée De L’Elysée Lausanne, Switzerland and The Hayward Gallery, London, England. He also participated in the Rome Photography Festival 2004, Rome, Italy and was awarded the Leica Prize during the Fourth Grand Prix International de Photographie, Vevey, Switzerland. Recently his work was included in ECCE UOMO at Spazio Oberdan, Milan.