The World Bank Vice Presidency for Europe and Central Asia and the World Bank Art Program are honored to present Where’er you touch,
there’s interest without end:
Pictures from Fritz Wentzel's
Balkan travels (1906-1910) 
| A Man from the Mainland (Morlak) - Sobenico
(present-day Šibenik, Croatia) |
“Where’er you touch, there’s interest without end” exhibition presents a selection of early 20th-century photographs from the Balkans taken by Fritz Wentzel (1877-1963) in the early 1900s. Originally from Berlin, Germany, Wentzel belonged to the then young amateur photography movement. The subjects that interested Wentzel were everyday realities of different cultures and distant lands. During his university years and shortly after graduation Wentzel traveled in Europe equipped with a portable Mentor Graflex camera and took pictures of local people, architectural landmarks and street scenes. Presented in this exhibition are the photographs of the Adriatic coast and the inland Balkans. What strikes viewer in these pictures is the immediacy of emotions and absence of wariness and posing in Wentzel’s subjects. His images of architectural landmarks may appear naïve at first glance but to a responsive viewer they convey a sense of meditative solitariness and peace. 
| The Bridge over Neretva - Mostar
(present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina) |
When Wentzel moved to the United States in 1926, he took the heavy and fragile glass plates with negatives of his European travels along. These glass plates – images of Europe as it once was – were discovered several years after Weltzel’s death by his son Volkmar Wentzel (1915-2006), a successful National Geographic photographer, who donated a number of the prints to the World Bank. The star of the Wentzel exhibition is the photograph of the 16th-century Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rebuilding of which after destruction in a military conflict in 1993 was financed by the Cultural Heritage Project (1999-2004). | January 22 to February 22, 2008 |
The World Bank H building Lobby
600 19th Street N.W.
Washington, DC
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