Henning von Berg

Henning von Berg
Henning von Berg. Portrait by JohnAigner for HvB
Born	(1961-06-10)June 10, 1961 Hanover, Germany
Occupation	Civil engineer, photographer

Henning von Berg (born 10 June 1961 in Hannover) is a former German civil engineer who became a people photographer. His specialty is character portraits and fine art nudes.

Henning von Berg was born in Northern Germany into a family with a nearly 500-year-old history. He worked as an engineer for thirteen years until the age of 35, when he discovered his calling was to be a photographer.

In the summer of 1997, he organized his first group photo shoot. This featured 28 nude men in an abandoned factory in Cologne, on the river Rhine. Afterwards, the exhibition "Factory Boyz" quickly gained attention all around Germany for its bizarre combination of "body & building". Just one year later the image "Stairway" of this series with 13 nude male models was chosen by an American publisher to be included in an international anthology about photography:

In Phil Braham's book "Naked Men Exposed - A Celebration of the Male Nude from 90 of the World's Greatest Photographers", the self-taught Berg was listed beside photographer icons like David Hockney, Horst P. Horst, Harriet Leibowitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eadweard Muybridge, Man Ray and Andy Warhol.

In 1999, Berg claimed more recognition by organizing a whimsical social-political statement on public nudity. With his team he photographed six completely naked men in front of a dozen tourist highlights of Berlin, including the inside of the historical parliament Reichstag building. Thousands of fascinated passers-by applauded the fun happening throughout the city.

This series "Naked Berlin" was supposed to be a political comment to show the liberal atmosphere and open-minded politics of the reunified republic. The politically active Berg wanted to document that his home country has learned from the terrible Nazi history and that Germany now is a modern democracy with a tolerant spirit and total freedom for the arts.