Dieter Blum began working as a photographer and photojournalist in the early 1960s. His artistically choreographed photos were published in prominent magazines such as “Vanity Fair”, “Time Magazin”, and “Der Spiegel”. Not least through his many years of work on the internationally known Marlboro advertising campaign, Blum became one of the most significant photographers of his generation – especially in the interface between product advertising and documentary photography.
The magazine “stern” commissioned him to create a number of photo shoots. In May 1989, he created – jointly with Peter Sandmeyer – an article totalling several pages on the mystique of the “Mercedes-Benz” brand. Dieter Blum was responsible for the pictures, which were equal to the textual element and appeared to tell their own story, in a separate reality. Blum’s contributions are characterised by their individual choice of motif, which gives the reader an extraordinary insight into the production world of Daimler-Benz AG as it existed at the time: the sequence of a crash test, the assembly lines photographed in severe central perspective, and the unconventional transport of a state car. Not just Blum himself but the Sindelfingen site workers involved must have had to work very intensively on this series. For the unique large-format photograph acquired by the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, they completely dismantled a Mercedes-Benz E 300 (W 124) red limousine and painstakingly arranged the 610 individual pieces. For this photo, Blum used a spectacular vertical downward perspective, a perspective that was made a Blum trademark by his “Russia” volume of photographs (1980) and his American Airlines campaign, if not before
Dieter Blum
Mercedes-Benz E 300, 1989
