until Sunday November 16 2014

Museum Ludwig
T : +49 !0)221 221 24 114
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
D-50667 Köln
Germany

In times of sweep­ing so­ci­e­tal trans­for­ma­tions and cris­es, pho­tog­ra­phy be­comes an im­por­tant medi­um. Af­ter all, as an im­age of re­al­i­ty, the pho­to­graph has an im­me­di­ate im­pact that the pho­to the­o­rist Ro­land Barth­es, in his book Cam­era Lu­ci­da (1979), called un­tamed. It is this di­rect con­nec­tion to re­al­i­ty, “The awak­en­ing of in­tractable re­al­i­ty,” that makes the doc­u­men­tary as well as the artis­tic ap­proach sig­ni­f­i­cant in pe­ri­ods of rad­i­cal change.

The ex­hi­bi­tion there­fore fo­cus­es not on in­di­vi­d­u­al im­ages, but on se­ries. It fea­tures one se­ries for each of the thir­teen artists and pho­to­g­ra­phers rep­re­sent­ed in the mu­se­um’s col­lec­tion, in­clud­ing Robert Adams, Joachim Brohm, Ute Klophaus, and Can­di­da Höfer. Loans of works by David Gold­blatt, Miyako Ishi­uchi, and Raghu­bir Singh com­ple­ment the col­lec­tion.