Route 96

Josef Wolfgang Mayer

Along the German B96 highway, which leads through the eastern part of the country, from Zittau to Rügen, the photographer Josef Wolfgang Mayer explores the German provinces of today. Houses, cars, plazas, signs, paths, fields and trees form references to the people that are missing in the images. Oscillating between a new beginning and the past, modernity and decay, numerous indications of cultural life and ‘natural states’, the photographs speak with poetic resonance. On the one hand sober, on the other atmospheric and occasionally ironic, the large-scale colour works, which belong to the tradition of straight photography, take the viewer on a visual journey through German sensibilities.