Michael Schmidt , Thomas Struth, Tobias Zielony
»Stadtbilder«

Michael Schmidt's oeuvre, which extends over 50 years, is represented with works from key series. Since 1965, when the self-taught artist began taking photographs, Schmidt’s work has repeatedly engaged with the city of Berlin as he observed the changing urban landscape of his native city. Stadtbilder consists of grey-tone, small-format photographs, conveying an objective account of former West Berlin's repetitive architecture as the site of historical and social process. In the series Waffenruhe, Schmidt again depicts former West Berlin just before the fall of the wall in social scenes and unspecified places along and around the wall. The non-hierarchical but meticulously composed arrangements of charged images implicitly intertwines personal lives and historical events.

In the late 1970s Thomas Struth began to photograph various cities and streets to experiment with different exposures and compositions. Struth initially used the city as an architectural backdrop to portray the individual figure but quickly turned to systematically documenting ordinary streets. The focus was to document the everyday rather than the result of a subjective selection. His black and white photographs are always structured around a central perspective where the camera is placed on a tripod in the middle of the street. The exhibition includes photographs from the series Düsseldorf and Streets of New York.

Tobias Zielony photographs young minorities and subcultures in suburban areas around the world in work that touches on themes that include migration, drug abuse and sex work in series such as Jenny, Jenny and Maskirovka. In opposition to a repressive society, the youths portrayed have created their own groupings and contexts in carparks, petrol stations and malls at night. The photographs move beyond social reportage and try neither to interpret nor explain, but rather recall music videos. Zielony considers and describes the teenagers' behaviour in groups and as individuals, their dominance and frailty.