Barbara Klemm is a German press photographer who worked for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 45 years. She photographed many of the most important events in recent German history and has received honors including Fellowship of the Academy of Arts, Berlin and the Pour le Mérite, and she was inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame in recognition of her status as "a driving force in reportage photography" and as "an exemplary photographer.”
She was born in Münster and grew up in Karlsruhe. Her father Fritz Klemm was a painter and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe.
In 1959 she moved to Frankfurt to work for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), for which she worked until 2004. As a press photographer she photographed events including the 1969 student riots in Frankfurt, Heinrich Böll protesting against nuclear weapons in 1983, the 1969 celebrations in Cuba for the tenth anniversary of the revolution, the first democratic elections in Portugal in 1975, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
She has photographed celebrities including Mick Jagger, Tom Waits, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, György Ligeti, Andy Warhol, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Her famous photographs include Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev kissing East German leader Erich Honecker in 1979. Throughout her life she has consistently used black-and-white analog (film) photography, typically single photographs rather than series.
