In her laudatory speech, German scholar, author and founder Dr Auma Obama paid tribute to Baumgartl’s work: her photos “capture the soul of their subjects with great sensitivity – be it people or nature.” They are a pure and unadulterated expression of her respect and love for humanity and our environment. And: “I am delighted and honoured to count you, Nomi, as a friend.”
The internationally renowned photographer Nomi Baumgartl, who describes her photographic art as a “homage to creation”, focuses on the fragile interplay between humans and nature. The artist, who now lives in Murnau a. Staffelsee, was born in 1950 in the Swabian village of Unterringingen (Markt Bissingen). She began taking photographs professionally at the age of 21. In the same year, she submitted a portrait of Turkish migrants to the photokina trade fair competition in Cologne under the title Gesellschaft 1972 (Society 1972) and won first prize.
Baumgartl studied visual communication in Düsseldorf and learnt classic analogue photography, to which she has remained true to this day. At the beginning of her career, she focussed on photo reportage. She portrayed personalities such as Arthur Rubinstein, Joseph Beuys, Jane Goodall and Pope John Paul II and published in magazines such as Geo, Stern, Time and Life. At the beginning of the 1990s, Baumgartl caught the attention of the fashion world. She was regarded as a shooting star and worked for various fashion magazines, including Vanity Fair and Vogue.
After losing her long-term memory in a car accident in 1996 and suffering paralysis of her eye muscles, she had to relearn how to see and take photographs. She was helped by dolphin therapy from the Dolphin Aid Foundation in Hawaii, which she has supported as an ambassador ever since. Nature increasingly became the focus of her work. Since 2009, she has been focussing on the melting of ice in the Arctic and the Alps. In 2016, she founded the Alpine and climate protection project Eagle Wings – Protecting the Alps, in which she collaborates with the Earth Observation Centre of the German Aerospace Centre and the Schneefernerhaus environmental research station. Here she uses her photographic art to document the consequences of climate change. Baumgartl wants to “give nature more weight” with her pictures. In her own words, photography is “awareness work”.
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