Karsten Thielker was born on 12 November 1965 in Bergisch Gladbach in Germany. He initially was interested in travel photography. Thielker has started his career at a Mainz-area regional newspaper but an assignment by Associated Press to cover the Yugoslavian War drove him to war genre. He saw it as an opportunity to travel and to check his possible reactions in extreme situations, so he seized it: his career on conflict zones had started. Thielker´s most famous work is a photograph of Rwandan refugees carrying water back to a camp in Tanzania that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. At that time, he reported the Hutus and Tutsis overwhelming civil war together with Jaqueline Artz, Javier Bauluz and Jean-Marc Bouju.
His works have been exhibited in various European countries, in Mexico and in Nigeria and he has also conducted workshops for the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria, and Guadalajara, México. Thielker worked for the Rhein-Zeitung from 1981 to 1990, and for the Associated Press from 1990 to 1996 and as a freelance photographer from Berlin since 1997. He is known to be one of those photo journalists who have worked surrounded by confrontations with death, ethical issues and the consequences they witness when they report from conflict zones. Since 2010, he contributed to theInternet Image Database (www.piaxa.com), and founded the Berlin photography edition “berlindaily”. Apart from his dedication to street photography, he worked mostly for the Taz – Die Tageszeitung, but also for major German papers and magazines like Der Spiegel, Stern, FAZ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit.
Thielker’s career took him to many other conflicts and war zones, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, and Chechnya. “During the war in Bosnia, he made a photo project about a maternity ward in besieged Sarajevo — I think it says a lot about his love for mankind,” Janna Ressel, Karsten’s wife said, reflecting upon the years her husband spent abroad covering people living, fleeing and dying in armed conflicts. Beyond his photography, Thielker as we said also trained photojournalists in Eastern Europe, Central America and Asia. “So many potential, and definitely unique photos, will no longer appear in taz, the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, Zeit, and other publications — this will leave a huge void,” wrote Berlin photojournalist Stefan Boness in the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung of his friend Thielker’s death.
Karsten Thielker diary | October 1993 | Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
“Sarajevo again!
I really wanted to go to Moscow, revolutionary changes, insurrection of parliament, Boris Jelzin in trouble. But no, me, eternal yes-sayer, had no choice yet again. Or maybe I had. Had I said no, the rest of the year would be just Germany. Endless football, the stock exchange, the Federal Bank. So, better a Yes. Yes to everything across the German border. Foreign countries, foreign manners. But the travel shelves looked like a Russian supermarket, nothing good left, the only things left in masses were inedible. Sarajevo sitting on the shelf – someone crazy would grab it. And I, I take it all.
So, back to the German supermarket, buying stuff for the time in the besieged city. Where there’s nothing, but there’s everything for sale in DM, the German currency.
Looking back, it was like carrying gold bars. With the suitcases full of coffee, chocolate, cigarettes and a hundred other little things, whose value would be tenfold just by the change of place.
They’ve been shooting here in Sarajevo for 18 months. Every day they die, they are wounded, they survive. The year before in August I survived five weeks, now I will try again. But this time span seems ridiculous compared to those who live here, survive here.
The photographer returns to the place of his pictures. Perpetrator, voyeur, provider of the daily sensation.”
(the rest of the gallery from Sarajevo you can see here)
Karsten Thielker diary | October 1993 | Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
“Almost 18 months of photos and words from the besieged city. Burning buildings, dead civilians, dead soldiers, bombed lines of people waiting for their daily bread, bodies drowning in their blood. Extremes, sensations, things never seen. Months later only duplicates of the first scenery of horror are being produced. Sarajevo repeats itself. No development, no victory, no defeat, no fall, no liberation. Only suffering in unlimited variations, yet ascertainable in statistics. And me, I select, I turn the pain into something newsworthy. Provider of the people having breakfast, of waiting taxi cabdrivers, subway riders, park sitters, intellectuals, bus drivers, bar patrons, money earners, jobless guys.
Until the next fish is wrapped in the paper, until the homeless takes it as a shelter, until the press officer copies and archives, until politicians react and people cry out – waiting for the next picture, the next horror scenario, the extreme even more extreme – something new, some different perspective. Excuse my emotional aberration – I slid into the feature.
Again, I take the ice channel of the Olympic city, getting faster, many curves. As if, after 1/40 sec., everything wasn’t in the past. As if through every curve I slid into the top news, replaced soon after by a long straight line, requiring a lot of routine, talent and concentration.
Sometimes you seem to leave the channel, you think you lose control of your device. Everything would be over – the gold medal – gone. The Sarajevo citizens are not given any medals. There were never medals given for mere survival. Even though all still surviving inhabitants should be in the Guinness book of Records by now. The living master survivors, super-survivors in deadly surroundings.”
Karsten Thielker diary | October 1993 | Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
“Impossible to write in words, to illustrate with photos. So many truths, these extremes. Kosevo Hospital. The shooting started at 4 am. Now I’m sitting again, as a year before, at the entrance of the Emergency Room, lurking my victims. Nothing has changed, only the entrance door switched. My victims: the same. Old women, small children, bleeding soldiers. At breakfast, I enjoyed marmalade and honey sandwiches. Here’s the bloody dessert. People with half faces, missing limbs, disfigured look, spilling guts – blood, blood, blood. Helpless moaning of severely injured – does this fit the format? That’s action, as Richy (AP – stringer in Sarajevo) says, with the negatives of wounded people on the light table. Which only means, some shots document more drama. And even those fail my acceptance – if you image how many photos were made in front of this hospital in the past 18 months. How often we heard the honking cars, signal to get ready for our next shot, meat inspection for our clients, the quest for the new, the other, unheard of – selection of horror – Just like in a commercial. “In TV, you’re sitting in the first row”, they say. But who is really sitting in the first row… not those in the easy chairs, on the sofa, in bed, the boring, lonely, the wisemen – they are only being shown what we, who are really sitting in the first row, are producing.”
(the rest of the gallery from Sarajevo you can see here)
Karsten Thielker diary | 26 October 1993 | Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
“War makes you tired – but obviously only the journalists. The Balkan peoples never tire of shooting. But I’m tired of photographing, of lamenting. War palaver. Every day a new story, even though it’s only repetition. Don’t know where to go with my energy, my courage, my envy of photos I never lived. Instead: everyday agency life, similarity of crises. War for agency photographers means: 5 – 10 % taking pictures, 50 – 60 % trying to transmit pictures, rest of the time: eat, drink and sleep. What a reduction on the existential, taking on work as something existential. How fast you’re lost in your surroundings, being a victim of your surroundings, not being strong enough. Just because three shabby Bosnian soldiers ordered my curfew? At gunpoint, of course. The fear of darkness, of grenades, of drunken soldiers, irregular patrolmen – fear for life. That miserable life. Who made me have fear, secure myself, obey, function? Emotionless mass of human, taking optical devices for a walk. Voyeur, neutral visual instance, technically functional for news.”
After his years with the AP, which also included working on the photo desk in London, Thielker eventually returned to his home base of Berlin in 2010 where he focused on street photography. “Karsten was an excellent and highly talented photographer — his Pulitzer-winning work in Rwanda and long stints in the Balkans prove this beyond doubt,” said Tony Hicks, AP’s Deputy Director of Photography, International. “He was also a lovely man who made a lot of friends throughout his career and someone I am glad to say I had the pleasure of working closely with when he came to work on the London photo desk.“ Some of his most recent work included photos of life in the German capital during the coronavirus pandemic. He also founded the photo website Berlin Daily and sometimes worked together with his wife. “Our passion for Berlin city life connected us; I work as a city guide in Berlin,” Janna Ressel said. “That way we could sometimes combine our work.”
“He called the expectations of the mass media “pervert”. Feed them some suffering children, and they’ll be happy, and the day after, everything is forgotten and the world’s attention moves on to the next crisis. This was one of the reasons he quit the job. When Karsten won the Pulitzer for the AP group’s work in the Rwanda genocide, in 1995, he despised the fancy setting of the Pulitzer ceremony in New York, with champagne reception and smiling faces. Knowing that the next day, the journalists were to return to all the different bloody war theaters, anywhere on earth, trying to stay alive shooting pictures. Of course, he was proud of the Pulitzer, too. But he never showed off with his work. The scenes he saw in Bosnia, in Somalia, Chechnya, Rwanda, did haunt him for years. It helped him to process those memories in photo exhibitions. And no matter how he pretended distance to his jobs: it is obvious from just looking at his pictures that Karsten had a deeply empathic relationship to fellow humans. And he absolutely hated violence and wars. For him, ‘Sarajevo Birth’ is one of his most important series. He took those pictures maybe as a counter-spell against the death around him. For all I know, Karsten was a wise man.” Janna L. Ressel
KARSTEN THIELKER was born on 12 November 1965 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany.
He died on 3 October 2020 of cancer in Berlin, Germany.
Cover photo by Rüdiger Knobloch
Special thanks to Janna L. Ressel
Thanks to Yorck Maecke
Music used: ‘Mozart – Requiem’
The song is permitted for non-commercial use under license:
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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