With the interlocking themes of "Urban life, architecture, industry", the Photographic Collection/SK Stiftung Kultur is again presenting a selection from its own holdings with historical and contemporary series of works in its anniversary year. Altogether there are exhibits by 20 photographers from Germany, Italy, the USA and Japan who have realized their work in various cultural contexts.
But as different as the concepts are, they are united by the motivation to capture the environment they experience in the visual document and to convey it in the most differentiated and authentic way possible. Houses and settlements in urban and rural areas, buildings, technical constructions, specific inventions, production processes, products, equipment and interventions in the landscape are presented and transformed into insightful views and series of works. Measures to secure livelihoods and to meet needs, aesthetic ideas and cultural identities emerge. The focus is on grown structures, overlooked moments and moments owed to chance. The person in the immediate image tends to recede into the background, no matter how much his everyday life and work is often the origin of what is reflected in the photographs shown, it becomes the motif of the picture. What becomes clear is that urban life moves within the framework of a wealth of architecturally and industrially shaped phenomena and processes.
The documentary photographs, taken since the 1920s, also make it clear from today's perspective that the natural environment on which everything is based also works through the network of what is shown, changes in substance as well as in its meaning and plays a new essential role plays. Questions of time determine the interpretation of what we perceive, and above all it is photographs that stimulate on many levels to deal with the past in the field of tension between the present and the future.