MICHAEL NAUMANN

John Simon Guggenheim

Memorial Foundation 90 Park Avenue New York, New York 10016

Dr. Michael Naumann Editor / Publisher

18 September 2009 U.S.A.

To whom it may concern,

Martine Barrat is known to me as a competent and artistically highly respectable photographer since more than 20 years. In 1982 she was commissioned by DIE ZEIT to do a photo-essay on the South Bronx, which resulted in stunning photographs, which were picked up all around the world. Some of them reappeared in LIFE magazine. Throughout my journalistic career as a correspondent, then Foreign Editor of DER SPIEGEL, but also as publisher of Rowohlt Verlag in Germany and later as CEO of Henry Holt, I maintained contact with Ms. Barrat, following her photographic path with great admiration. In Germany I published her book "Die Boxer" (published by Viking under the title Do or Die") and later as Cultural Minister of Germany, I tried to support her work in other ways. Martine Barrat has become a unique chronicler of life in Harlem. Observing her work there is watching a charismatic and simultaneously modest and quiet person observing other people. She has always been able to project an aura of trust and friendship. Some of this shows in her pictures, which have become, as I know, collector's items. Their uniqueness is, in a way, old fashioned. Martine Barrat's strength is classical black and white photography. It is clear that her photographs do not attempt to expose those, who appear in them nor to make blatant political or sociological statements. They also are not documents of anthropological curiosity but of a rather emotional nexus with New Yorkers, who usually do not crave for such attention, being completely non-prominent people. Barrat's photographs open windows into a world unknown to those other New Yorkers, who do not venture above 120th Street.

19 June 2003

To whom it may concern,

Martine Barrat, resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, has been working for DIE ZEIT as a free lance photographer and will continue to do so. Her work is highly appreciated, since she is one of the very few photographers working extensively and continuously amongst minorities of New York City. The quality of her work is outstanding, professional and reliable.

Martine Barrat has also worked for the Japanese fashion designer Yamamoto, doing an exquisite job, which did not follow the style of contemporary fashion photography. These pictures and others have been featured in a traveling expositions in Germany and France. If I were to judge the artistic quality of Ms. Barrat's photography, I would not hesitate to place it next to the greats of her genre, who preceded her: Bresson, Kertesz, Eisenstaedt. It has been her fate to work in a time when crass, brutal and blatant photographic statements about reality have become fashionable and salable in the few remaining outlets for high class photog- raphy. Her persistence, however in continuing on her path is a good indication for her artistic mind, which seems to be incorruptible by all sorts of commercial temptations of our time. I strongly support her application.