Biography

The photographic work of Miron Zownir deals with the hidden realities on the so-called fringes of society. Although his approach is extremely unsparing and rude, the images it renders are often surprisingly poetic, and deeply appealing.

Beyond all standards and aesthetic conventions Zownir’s photography discloses intimate situations and moments full of ecstasy, frenzy, intoxication, melancholy, tenderness and despair.
The human body therein continually appears as a sort of final possession, like the shroud of a self-exposing soul; un-idealised in its beauty, or ugliness.

Zownir’s intuitive proximity to outsiders and misfits, and the candidly open, very direct communication with the person(s) opposite of his lens, place his body of work among the most exceptional and radical examples of documentary-photography in our time.
In spite of encountering obstacles such as repeated arrests and subsequent censorship for alleged pornographic subject matter, and experiencing assault and threat on countless occasions during his photographic researches, Zownir never settled for a restricted vision. A strong believer in the power of his close-combat style, he keeps pushing the pain-limit ever a little further.

Miron Zownir took up photography in the late 70s during the hey-days of the punk-phenomenon, delivering a tight portrayal of the movement and its peculiar attitude towards life in limbo between a utopian vision of anarchy and nihilistic self-destruction. In 1980, he emigrated to the USA, where he lived for the next fifteen years; first in New York, then in Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. In New York, back then arguably the world’s most fascinating and permissive metropolis, Zownir’s peculiar approach to covering the city’s multiple-layered day-to-day lunacy was quickly recognised by the local scene and earned him a reputation as the “Teutonic Phenomenographer” (Village Voice).

Shot in moody, expressionistic b/w, Zownir’s pictures from that period give a penetrating insight to inner-city sub-cultural spheres, which, in their original local context, have since perished in the boom of the 90s.
His lens captured the untamed lust at the gay-parties, just shortly before Aids massively claimed its victims; the futile protest of artists and offbeat performers against the increasing commercialisation of Manhattan; the hopelessness on the Bowery; the shadowy world of hookers, bums, junkies, psychos and traumatised Vietnam vets.
Zownir’s photographs of the ‘Sex Piers’ have become legendary documents by now. The shut-down and dilapidated port area located between the Westside Highway and the Hudson River, with its sunbathing section for nudists and the surrounding ‘halls of the anonymous lust’, was a popular meeting place among homosexuals and transsexuals. When a male corpse, tied up in S&M bondage style, was fished out of the Hudson, and a madman killed several homosexuals in a gay-bar nearby, the events at the Sex Piers broke headlines for the first time. Branded by public opinion as a Mecca for perversions, notorious trouble spot, and hotbed of diseases, the piers were eventually banned by the police and partially demolished in the early eighties.

During his long residence in America, Zownir worked not only as a photographer but also ventured into filmmaking, an ambition he had held since the mid-seventies. He wrote and directed several short underground films, which were mainly produced by Chosei Funahara, founder of the legendary band ‘Plasmatics’. Another of Zownir’s collaborators on these projects was Alexandre Rockwell, who would go on to direct the independent hits IN THE SOUP and FOUR ROOMS, then working as director of photography. At the time, Zownir also developed a series of film exposés for the Japanese author and director Ruy Murakami (TOKYO DECADENCE), whose MARATHON MAN he directed, with Murakami producing the film. When Zownir moved from L.A. to Pittsburgh, he collaborated with filmmaker Lance Weiler (HEAD TRAUMA, THE LAST BROADCAST). In 1992 Weiler worked as a cameraman on Zownir’s film DEAD END.

The 1993 SKINHEAD LANE/AUF OFFENER STRASSE, an anti-racism spot, was Zownir’s first short film that was shot in Germany. It was followed by the cynical gangster ballad NOW OR NEVER/JETZT ODER NIE, a 1996 production by the Filmwerkstatt Münster, realised as part of the German-Dutch project ‘dialog cultuur – NL in NRW’.

In summer 1995 Zownir travelled to Russia; the trip was sponsored by the Erotic Art Museum of Hamburg, where he had a solo show shortly before, and its initial purpose was to document the nightlife in Moscow. But the nearly omnipresent confrontation with excessive misery on the streets of Moscow eventually induced him to change the subject of his research. Instead of photographing Russia’s nouveaux riches getting having fun in fancy night-clubs, Zownir started cruising around railway-stations and the tunnels of underpasses, the last resorts for the city’s complete outcasts, taking pictures of homeless, dying and dead people. According to Zownir, he experienced Moscow as “the most aggressive and dangerous city I’ve ever been to.” Yet even Russian militia with their semiautomatic rifles levelled couldn’t keep him away from depicting the blatant social and moral decline in the former Soviet Union. Zownir’s images from Russia are bitter and brutal, and highly distressing to view. The human tragic of radical poverty, that they reveal, ultimately climaxes in the pathetically lonely and utterly undignified act of dying in public. “It was Dante’s inferno,” Zownir would state when he returned to Berlin after three months of a terrifying descend into the lower depths of the post-Soviet society.

The focus on extreme subjects and extraordinary forms of the human condition continued to be the central motivation of Zownir’s work. In the ‘Holy Year’ 2000, he went to France and Spain to picture pilgrims in Lourdes, and a fraternity of flagellants in San Vincente de la Soncierra. Some of his photographs were shown amongst artworks of the likes of Goya, Picasso, Alfred Kubin and Cindy Sherman in the 2004 group exhibition ‘El salvaie europeo’ in Barcelona and Valencia.

In Berlin, Zownir’s home since his return from Russia in 1995, he directed the documentary film BRUNO S. – ESTRANGEMENT IS DEATH / DIE FREMDE IST DER TOD, a feature-length portrayal of Bruno S., the backyard musician, painter and main protagonist of Werner Herzog’s films THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER and STROSZEK. ESTRANGEMENT IS DEATH was shown at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival, and numerous other international film festivals.
In 2006, Zownir made VALUEV VS. VIOLENCE, a spot against violence, in which Nikolai Valuev, the Russian boxer and former heavyweight champion gives his opinion on the topic of aggression.
Between projects, Zownir has repeatedly worked as a lecturer at the DFFB, the German Academy for Film and Television in Berlin.

The publication of the crime novel KEIN SCHLICHTER ABGANG (No Easy Way Out) in 2003 marked Miron Zownir’s debut as an author of noir-style fiction. A bizarre, gloomy pulp story, the book was published as an original paperback by MirandA Verlag, now Mox&Maritz Verlag, known for their German editions of the works of Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Harry Crews, et al.
Since then, Zownir completed the two novels DAS FALSCHE LÄCHELN DER SONNE (The False Smile of the Sun) and LANA, the short novel AMOKLAUF DER GEFÜHLE (Emotions on the Rampage), as well as the script for the neo-noir feature-film thriller SCHNEEBALL (Snowball), and a collection of short stories titled PARASITEN DER OHNMACHT (Parasites of Impotence).

Zownir’s prose is saturated with fragments of his biography, and many of its locales are inspired by places where he lived. He scoops out of the riches of his observations and experiences with oddities in all shades, merging them with imaginative elements in the realm of fiction to a pitch-black, highly idiosyncratic symbiosis. Zownir’s uneasy vision of life on the verge of lunacy pushes the boundaries of the classic pulp story into new dimensions of anxiety and doom, habitually confronting the reader with the most unpopular direction of all: downward. Down there, in the depths of human existence, Zownir has his hapless losers frantically wrestling with curse-like fates; and no heroes will prevail in the end in this gloomy conglomerate of violence, loneliness, obsession and false hope.

As a photographer Miron Zownir has continually worked on different projects over the past years. Following-up RADICAL EYE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MIRON ZOWNIR, which was published by Die Gestalten Verlag in 1997, he is currently editing another photo book containing his latest work.
Some critics claim that Zownir, in his own characteristic manner, ties on where Diane Arbus and Weegee had stopped.
But when it comes to the basis of his artistic intention, Miron Zownir would rather point to a quote from Kafka’s ‘The Castle’:

“If one has the strength to look at the things incessantly, more or less without ever closing the eyes, one sees much. But if one lessens the effort only once and closes the eyes, it all immediately vanishes into darkness.”