Achim Bahr, born in 1956 in Cologne, studied painting at the renowned Academy of Fine Arts (grad.) in Duesseldorf, Germany, and philosophy. Right from the beginning of his studies, he almost exclusively focused on stereoscopic experiments in his artistic work of painting and drawing. In 1981 he published the drawing of a chessboard, Immaterielles Schachspiel, the very first graphic of its kind which he called Stereoscopic Anamorphosis (aka phantogram). Numerous exhibitions and commissioned works in resp. from the inland and foreign countries did follow, and 1984 he showed Nighthawks 3D, the very first 2D/3D-conversion of an existing (two-dimensional) painting.
Achim Bahr
With the stereoscopic anamorphosis of Neuschwanstein which was published in 1994, Achim Bahr set a new standard to this area of three-dimensional pictures which was developed and led to perfection by him; several variants were produced, among them the largest of its manner which lies on the ground and is to be seen by the observer standing upright. Since 1995 Achim Bahr is also working on the animation of stereoscopic anamorphosises. Meanwhile, sequences of different size and length have been shown at the Stereoscopic Displays and Applications Conference in San Jose, 2005, and at the photokina in Cologne, 2006 and 2008.
Besides numerous other projects, Achim Bahr turned to stage work, too, where he successfully adapted binocular visualization methods for stage design and for expanding as well as replacing the traditional stage set with 3D projections.
2007, at the International Stereoscopic Conference S3D-Today+ in Munich, Achim Bahr even presented the world wide very first phantograms which can be interactively operated by the observer, thus providing a new kind of real-time VR/AR in the field of high-end/low-cost applications, no matter what size they will be, without particular hardware, and enabling the use of any 3D data sets.
Since 2008, Achim Bahr holds a lectureship and is the founder as well as the leader of the 3D Lab at the BTK, Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule, University of Applied Sciences. — Achim Bahr’s stereoscopic works can be seen in very renowned national collections like Deutsches Museum Munich, Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden, etc.