Fischer is the kind of artist that used to crop up time and again in the belated metropolis Berlin over the last 200 years: unpretentious, completely devoted to his cause and not easily deterred by adversity, worldly wise and full of empathy for people. His sense of humour is tinged with wisdom, and every once in a while we catch a glimpse of it in his pictures. Yet, humour and melancholy are but two sides of the same coin, and Fischer’s photographs always seem suffused with an aura of melancholy. They capture the moment, but they also evoke the transience of life.

What distinguishes Fischer’s photographs is their poised focus on the unspectacular, their semblance of calm, irrespective of whether they were taken in Cold War Berlin or in 1980s New York. Arno Fischer never photographs the high point of an event. The moment in which he triggers the shutter of his camera is usually the one when a single individual begins to break away from his surroundings, a glance, a shift in attention, a small often barely perceptible deviation from the normality of the event observed. Arno Fischer’s declaration ‘I don’t compose; the world itself is the composition’ also means that he does not have to look for dramatic situations, does not have to stage-manage, because the world and life themselves are replete with dramaturgical ideas.

Matthias Flügge