The Invention of the Real

K.T. Blumberg, Dieter Hanke, Irinadabo, Tobias Keppler, Torsten Schumann, Dieter Seitz, Cina F. Sommerfeld, Ruth Stoltenberg, Wolfgang Zurborn

These works by nine photographers present an array of subjective perceptions and values in the real world of everyday life. Brought together under the title The Invention of the Real, their photo series offer personal views of urgent present-day phenomena, of social contexts, private relationships and the fragile constructions we employ to remember the past.
The works introduced in this exhibition project operate in the area of tension between document and orchestration. The interplay between the two gives rise to a complex web of thematic and formal correlations that liberate photography from the corset of illustrating text and enable it to manifest its own intrinsic quality as an independent visual language.
The particular quality of the photographic medium resides in its ability to engage in a dialogue with the outside world and repeatedly question its own criteria of perception in order to carry these over into an open-ended process, an experiment in seeing.