Coloured Echoes

Colour Photographs

Josef Wolfgang Mayer

The exhibition Coloured Echoes presents colour photographs by Josef Wolfgang Mayer. With his large-format camera he records signs of his times: urban details of Berlin as a fascinating interplay of architectural forms and patterns, chance objects and word signs – a juxtaposition and merging of the most diverse epochs of the city and the cultures of its inhabitants. The perspectives, shot with a 4-by-5-inch camera, only seem banal and reveal a subtle irony on closer inspection. The images are accurate in every detail, for Mayer, in the tradition of ‘still’ and ‘straight photography’, deliberately dispenses with technical and visual tricks, posed and manipulated subjects, and supposedly grand motifs. They are sober, precisely composed colour photographs that seem objective and at the same time ambivalent: the deserted locations allude to inhabitants and visitors whose diverse traces unfold into poetry in the world of shapes and colours of the photographic image.