27. September 2025, 12:06
Her cheeks have come up with, her face is ash pale, the eyes are closed. If you look into the face of a dying person, according to the photographer and filmmaker Gisela Getty, watch a process of transformation. For months, Gisela Getty has photographically accompanied the death of her twin sister Jutta Winkelmann with her consent. In 2017, Winkelmann succumbed to her cancer. As part of this year’s Berlin Art Week, the pictures were publicly seen for the first time. “My sister worked on a book until shortly before her death in which she deals with her illness,” recalls Gisela Getty. “After overcome the fear, she said that this book was too penetrated by despair. She wanted to make something beautiful that gives people courage. Since she had no strength herself, she asked me to implement her wish. This was how the work ‘Ashes to Rishikesh’ was created.”
Gate for transformation
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Jutta Winkelmann fought against cancer for many years, first of all of her breast cancer, then bone cancer was diagnosed. Winkelmann decided against chemotherapy and in the last few months of her life against morphine. The pain she must have felt is difficult to present. The disappearance of the body is documented in the pictures that Gisela Getty shot for months. At the end of her life, Jutta Winkelmann weighs less than 30 kilos, her outstanding body triggers anxiety feelings.
Sometimes Gisela Getty’s shock pictures are reminiscent of the documentary photographs of the American star photographer Nan Goldin, who accompanied friends with the camera at the climax of AIDS pandemic. Goldin and Gisela Getty had to put up with the accusation of exploiting death as a spectacle to generate attention. A objection that Gisela Getty does not apply. “Of course, some of the pictures are shocking, or maybe even an imposition, but we just live in a society in which dying is displaced. People die in hospitals, locked away and hygienized – especially western societies no longer have mental access to die.”
Death as a taboo
In Germany, the average age was 44.9 years in 2024, 43.6 years in Austria. Nevertheless, according to Gisela Getty, death, the escape point of every life, is increasingly taboo in an outdated society. A paradox that Getty wants to counter with her photo project “Ashes to Rishikesh”. In the title of Indian Rishics, Jutta Winkelmann’s ashes was scattered in the Ganges.
Gisela Getty emphasizes that she wants to donate hope with her project:
If you stand up to these pictures and start up first and go through this horror, consciousness expands and you see something else.
1968 and the abolition of privacy
In the 1960s, Gisela Getty and Jutta Winkelmann, known as Getty-Twins, became icons of the 68 movement. The life of the two is reminiscent of a film script. Gisela married the billionaire son John Paul Getty III, later the twin couple with Rainer Langhans moved to a so -called harem.
The twin sisters Gisela and Jutta in 1973 in Rome
Claudio Slaughter
As a reminder: Langhans once achieved great popularity as a member of municipality 1 in Berlin. Magazines such as “Spiegel” and “Stern” made up with pictures from Germany’s best -known flat share in the 1960s. These up -to -maker stories were accompanied by headlines such as “they shared men and drugs”. They obviously aimed to satisfy the voyeuristic appetite of the philistine.
“First sheets, then speak” is said to have stood at the front door of the legendary Berlin municipality 1. The great universal scholar Alexander Kluge once interpreted this as an anticipation of reality TV. The municipalities not only completed the rigid customs of the post -war society, but also the privacy, once conceded clever. In this sense, it seems logical that the representatives of this generation of the departure also make their own dying a public event.
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Berlin Art Week – Gisela Getty: Ashes to Rishikesh