Henning von Berg

Biography

Henning von Berg was born in Northern Germany into a family with a nearly 500-year-old history. He worked as an engineer for thirteen years until the age of 35, when he discovered his calling was to be a photographer.

In the summer of 1997, he organized his first group photo shoot. This featured 28 nude men in an abandoned factory in Cologne, on the river Rhine. Afterwards, the exhibition "Factory Boyz" quickly gained attention all around Germany for its bizarre combination of "body & building". Just one year later the image "Stairway" of this series with 13 nude male models was chosen by an American publisher to be included in an international anthology about photography:

In Phil Braham's book "Naked Men Exposed - A Celebration of the Male Nude from 90 of the World's Greatest Photographers", the self-taught Berg was listed beside photographer icons like David Hockney, Horst P. Horst, Harriet Leibowitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eadweard Muybridge, Man Ray and Andy Warhol.

In 1999, Berg claimed more recognition by organizing a whimsical social-political statement on public nudity. With his team he photographed six completely naked men in front of a dozen tourist highlights of Berlin, including the inside of the historical parliament Reichstag building. Thousands of fascinated passers-by applauded the fun happening throughout the city.

This series "Naked Berlin" was supposed to be a political comment to show the liberal atmosphere and open-minded politics of the reunified republic. The politically active Berg wanted to document that his home country has learned from the terrible Nazi history and that Germany now is a modern democracy with a tolerant spirit and total freedom for the arts.

The fun photographs of "Naked Berlin" were published by newspapers around the globe as "Reichstags Rascals". To date, the series "Naked Berlin" remains the world’s first and only-ever male nude photo shoot inside of a parliament building.

In 2005, Berg produced a suitable counterpart by photographing the other gender on the other side of the earth. The scandalous series "Naked Sydney" documented a group of happy naked women in downtown Sydney in front of some Australian national symbols, including the famous Sydney Opera House.

Later both provocative series were presented in exhibitions worldwide. The Goethe-Institut, a German non-profit organization whose mission is to promote German language and culture outside of the German-speaking countries, promoted the exhibit "Naked Berlin - Naked Sydney" internationally and thus far more than 200,000 people have enjoyed the unique exhibitions.

Recent work

Henning von Berg is specialized in character portraits of seniors (his oldest model so far is a 108-year-old woman) and fine art nudes of mostly amateurs models. Von Berg prefers shooting in natural light conditions and likes to integrate panoramic landscapes and monumental buildings into his art.

For his various art projects, he likes to break traditional rules. He works with young and old people, men and women, aristocrats and prostitutes, athletes and disabled people, common folks and celebrities (e.g., Julius Shulman, Tim Curry, Kurt Kreuger, Derrick Davenport and Don Bachardy).

In autumn of 2006, the international non-profit art organization Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles asked von Berg to become a "Foundation Liaison" to Germany/Europe. At the same time, a well-known Australian publishing house appointed him as a "Correspondent" for the high-profile photography magazines "[not only] Blue" and "[not only] Black+White".

To date, his work has appeared in more than 480 international publications and 43 exhibitions in museums and galleries on four continents.

Exhibitions (selection)