Albrecht Becker

Albrecht Becker

Born: 1906, 14 November - Germand, Thale
Died: 2002, 22 April - Germany, Hamburg
Gender: Male
Active: Germany
 
Albrecht Becker (1906–2002) was a German photographer, production designer, actor, and gay cultural figure whose life and work are deeply intertwined with the tumultuous politics of twentieth-century Europe. Born in Thale, Saxony-Anhalt, Becker trained in graphic design and was active in both visual and performing arts during the Weimar Republic. His life took a fateful turn under the Nazi regime, when in 1935 he was arrested and convicted under Paragraph 175—the section of the German penal code criminalizing male homosexuality. He served over a year in prison and was later conscripted into the Wehrmacht, surviving the war and eventually returning to work in film and design. His internment and persecution shaped his lifelong engagement with identity, embodiment, and the visibility of queer lives, themes that permeate his photographic work.
 
Becker's photographic oeuvre, much of it created in the postwar decades, is characterized by an intimate and often unsettling exploration of the human body—particularly the male form—and a deep preoccupation with physical transformation, identity, and eroticism. His portraits and self-portraits often feature muscular, heavily tattooed or scarified bodies, sometimes including himself, documenting not only physical forms but also acts of bodily inscription. This was especially evident in his later work, where he photographed his own extensively modified body, which he had tattooed and pierced over decades, treating it as a living document of personal and sexual expression. Becker’s images reject idealized, classical representations of the male nude in favor of something rawer, almost confrontational, aligning his work with postwar existentialism and queer resistance.
 
His photographs range from traditional portraiture to experimental close-ups and constructed tableaux, often playing with theatrical lighting and minimalist backdrops. While his work remained largely underground for much of his life—given the climate of repression in mid-century Germany—it has since been rediscovered and reevaluated in the context of queer history, body politics, and post-Holocaust cultural memory. Becker’s contribution is notable not just for its aesthetic value, but for its courageous visibility and its insistence on documenting queer existence in the aftermath of fascist persecution.
 
Becker’s work was notably included in the landmark exhibition Paragraph 175 (1995), and he featured in the 2000 documentary film of the same name directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, in which he gave a moving account of his arrest, imprisonment, and lifelong struggle for dignity. Today, his photographs are recognized as a critical part of the visual archive of queer resistance in twentieth-century Europe—both an artistic expression and a deeply personal testament to survival, visibility, and the enduring complexity of the queer body.

Genealogy of Albrecht Becker

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