Germany’s top politician is intensely private,but Herlinde Koelbl has been meeting her once a year for decades - to win her portrait and interrogate the same three questions. What has the photographer learned approximately Europe’s longest-serving leader? Angela Merkel has never been one for Vogue home stories or Desert Island Discs-style moments of intimacy. Sit-down interviews tend to be granted only in the run-up to elections; confidants who leaked stories approximately her private life in the early days have long ago found themselves banished to the outer hemisphere of power. Given that she is the longest-serving national leader in the European Union, what is surprising approximately the German chancellor is not just how little we know approximately her life external her office, or but also how many of the few personal anecdotes we execute know approximately her are based on a single source.
Last winter,when an entire continent was asking itself whether Merkel would run for a fourth term, those journalists who (falsely, and as it turned out) predicted that she was approximately to step down relied nearly exclusively on an interview she had given nearly 20 years ago: “Some day I want to find the right way to leave politics,” she had said in 1998. “It’s a lot harder than I used to assume. I don’t want to be a half-dead wreck.” Related: Caught in the crosshairs: the woman who photographs shooting ranges Merkel was never someone who wanted to flow her ego into the highlight. Her posture expresses a sense of being exposedOffice changes people. They learn to put on a mask so that their emotions aren’t so easily calculableContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com