PASSion
Photographs by
Christopher Thomas

Thomas said to Him, Lord, we don't know where You are going, and how can we know the way? Jesus said to Him, I am the way the truth, and the life...“ (Joh. 14, 5-7)

Passion
Christopher Thomas' photographs capture 2010 the Oberammergau Passions Play from within. He has created portraits of people experiencing sorrow and pain, and who are dying, in a profoundly serious way. They sense that strength is generated through suffering: resurrection comes about through death. 

"When I shot a portrait of Christian Stückl ­– who has been the director of the passion play since 1990 ­­– for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, I did not know a lot about the passion play in Oberammergau. That changed fundamentally in recent weeks when I was allowed to attend the preparations for this year’s performance. The immense effort that the people of Oberammergau invest in their passion play overwhelmed me: for months, Christian Stückl and Otto Huber were occupied with revising the texts; Markus Zwink, with composing the music; Stefan Hageneier, with designing the stage sets which Carsten Lück then built, and the costumes, which were produced by many seamstresses under the direction of Ingrid Jäger – all with an incomparable love for detail."

"Christian Stückl impressed me most of all. I was immediately struck by his enormous energy, the passion he invests in his work, his indefatigable motivation of others while directing hundreds of amateur actors, all of whom he knows by name, on a giant stage, well into the night even with temperatures below freezing. Christian Stückl has a talent for asking questions. He wants to have the opinion of everyone involved and during rehearsals repeatedly asks the actors how they see their roles, what they feel. He asks and scrutinizes and involves everyone."

"Under Stückl’s influence, a rather stiff, inflexible repetition of a performance that has remained the same for eternity became a living play with credible, multidimensional characters. With a Judas who is not simply a traitor but a torn person with weaknesses and also good intentions, with a Jesus who is wild, determined, political and uncompromising. Christian Stückl manages to make the story of Jesus interesting again for people like me, who are critical of and distanced from the church – not in a didactic way, talking down, cliché-ridden or boring but questioning, conveying passion, expressing doubts and bringing everyone into it."

"This exhibition is not an overview, offers no explanation and makes no claim to completeness. My intention was to convey the timeless impressions of the Passion that are taken from classical painting – an attempt to capture the enormous energy and emotion of the performance. It is not a collection of the most important characters and scenes but tries rather to show just how important the old woman in the crowd is, the individual singer in the choir, the dedication of everyone. The few people shown here stand for the huge number of participants. The documentation originally planned has therefore become an interpretation."

Christopher Thomas received several awards for this cycle such as the Silver Medal of the Art Directors Club of Germany (2011) and the German Design Award (2013). The Bavarian National Museum in Munich exhibited a wide selection of photos from this cycle from October 2011 to April 2012 in its magnificent Gothic Hall. 

The Photographer
Christopher Thomas, born in 1961 in Munich and a graduate from the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Fotografie, has received a number of international awards as a commercial photographer. His photo reportages have appeared in magazines such as Geo, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Stern and Merian.

As an artist, Christopher Thomas has established a reputation above all through his city portraits. The first of his cityscapes was Munich Elegies which was exhibited at the Museum of Photography in Munich in 2005 (published by Schirmer/Mosel, 2005). This was followed by the series New York Sleeps that he worked on between 2001 and 2009. The companion publication, New York Sleeps. Photographs by Christopher Thomas, was published by Prestel in 2009 (6th edition 2012) and was awarded the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (German Photobook Prize).

Works by Christopher Thomas can be seen in major private and institutional collections such as the Francois Pinault Collection, the Sir Elton John Photography Collection and the German Bundestag Art Collection. 

© Photographs Christopher Thomas

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