PHOTOGRAPHING THE REALM OF SHADOWS

By Silvia Gonzalo, Germany Correspondent

Gloria Schneider and the Wave-Gotik-Treffen

Leipzig, a city that until 1990 belonged to East Germany, separated by the Iron Curtain from the Federal Republic we know today, was not always a place where the dark scene could show itself. According to old Germanic folklore, every Walpurgis Night witches flew to the summit of the Brocken, shrouded in fog, to hold their sabbath to the rhythm of drums, around bonfires that burned all night long. In 1988, a small real group gathered in Potsdam to mark that same date, and the regime's law enforcement broke up the gathering, seeing in that subculture a threat that was difficult to monitor. With reunification in 1990, that scene finally found freedom, and in 1992 it found a new home in Leipzig: the Wave-Gotik-Treffen was born there, with just 2,000 attendees. Today, every year, that same city transforms for four days into a stage taken over by the dark world: some 20,000 people from every continent fill its streets dressed in another era, while Leipzig wraps itself, for four days, in black velvet, Victorian corsets, and pale, dark makeup. What was once repressed is now celebrated as one of the largest gatherings of the dark scene in the world. Gloria, the German photographer, has spent years portraying those protagonists.

Before the Wave-Gotik-Treffen existed, there was an afternoon in a recording studio in New York where a fourteen-year-old girl saw up close what it means to create something of one's own and put it in front of others.

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IN HER OWN WORDS

Do you feel that artistic talent runs in the family? How did that encounter with your cousin Gil Scott-Heron shape your own creative awakening?

I was fourteen years old. I was visiting from Germany, in a recording studio in New York, watching my cousin record his first album. Back then, nobody yet knew him as Gil Scott-Heron, the musician and poet he would later become. Our artistic paths ended up being completely different, but that idea, of reaching people through your own work, stayed with me forever.

How did you come to photography after your television career?

Photography had been with me my whole life, but it was only after my time as a television producer in Germany came to an end that I could fully dedicate myself to my true passion. I finally had the time to develop my own projects and carry my photographic ideas through to the end.

Long before Leipzig's streets, Gloria's camera had already lingered on another kind of decaying beauty: the empty corridors of the former Frankfurt police headquarters, where plants have been climbing the walls for years.

Before the WGT you had other exhibitions. Tell us about them.

My first exhibition was called Back to the Fifties, centered on rock and roll, the fashion of the era, classic American cars, and that festive atmosphere. After that I turned to a darker subject, Lost Places, about the abandoned former police headquarters in Frankfurt, and later I presented Beautifully Unsettling, Unsettlingly Beautiful, entirely devoted to my photographic vision of the Wave-Gotik-Treffen. The last two were shown at Haus Sankt Martin am Autoberg, in Hattersheim, under the direction of Klaus Störch.

Taken together, these three exhibitions trace a single gaze, applied to different worlds. In Back to the Fifties there is nostalgia, the shine of chrome bringing back the optimism of an era that no longer exists. In Lost Places there is abandonment, the silence of a building slowly reclaimed by nature, hallway by hallway. And in the Wave-Gotik-Treffen there is grief turned into aesthetics, Victorian mourning turned into costume, turned into identity, walking down a real street. In all three cases, Gloria photographs what time transforms. Never what stays the same.

How did you come to the Wave-Gotik-Treffen?

It was pure chance. I was traveling in Leipzig and was struck by the commotion in the streets. The whole city was full of people in extraordinary garments, and not just any garments, but handmade pieces. I had no idea I had landed right in the middle of the Wave-Gotik-Treffen. In that moment I changed my travel plans and started photographing.

What drew you most to that aesthetic?

Since then I've taken thousands of photos. My images don't just aim to impress, they invite whoever looks at them to find their own story in them. To me, a good photograph doesn't just capture an instant, it opens a door to a world where reality and imagination intertwine.

Walking through that crowd is like stepping into a parade with no runway: the sharp thud of platform boots against cobblestone, the rasp of velvet against leather, the gleam of brass under a nearly always gray sky. There, side by side on the same street, and sometimes on the same body, a black lace Victorian dress meets a brass steampunk mask, a medieval suit of armor stands next to industrial boots with twenty-centimeter platforms, hand-sewn velvet capes sit alongside body modifications and contact lenses that change the entire color of the eye. Someone unfamiliar with the scene might mistake it for a costume. Someone wearing it knows it's the opposite: not a character shed at the end of the festival, but an identity worn on the outside.

How would you describe the wardrobe of the gothic scene?

It's a style that blends different eras, with simple base elements and extravagant accessories. Many people invest months in their garments and, during the festival, passionately embody who they truly are. There are elements from the Renaissance, the Victorian era, and Jugendstil (Central European Art Nouveau), almost never in pure form, but combined with one another in a deeply personal way.

Gloria photographs a whole map of subcultures within the dark scene, not a single style. There's traditional goth, faithful to the eighties aesthetic of band shirts and combat boots. Romantic goth, all lace and velvet. The one that evokes nineteenth-century mourning, with parasols and period garments. Cyber goth, which breaks the dark palette with neon colors, gas masks, and industrial aesthetics. Medieval goth, with capes and fantasy armor. And even pastel goth, which mixes soft tones with occult symbols. At the WGT, they all coexist on the same streets, sometimes in the same person.

How do you work on your photographs?

Every image begins with a real encounter. I photograph people as they are, in their own clothes, with their own expression, their own personality. Only afterward does the creative part begin: through a digital compositing process, those same people suddenly appear in mysterious castles, abandoned halls, or under dramatic cloudscapes. I don't add anything generated by artificial intelligence, and there's one rule I never break: I can take someone to a castle that doesn't exist, wrap them in fog they never breathed, dress them in fantasy until they're unrecognizable to anyone but themselves, but I will never touch who they truly are. That is sacred. Everything else is my dream. The person, always, remains herself.

Like in her own photographs, where the real and the imagined merge into a single image, she is that too: a real woman, with a real camera, who decided that the dark world deserved the same light as any other.