Window Orders

Photographs by André Kirchner 2001–2016

André Kirchner

For three decades now, André Kirchner (born 1958) has been one of the stylistically most influential photographers of the city of Berlin. Working in the tradition of analogue black-and-white photography and using a classic view camera, his is an individual artistic position. Presented in series, the leitmotifs of his systematic surveys of aspects of urban space consist of wastelands, city peripheries, free-standing buildings and empty lots, demolition and new construction. In his conceptual series Window Orders, he explores in 24 photographs one of the oldest motifs of photography, the window as both ordering element and part of a planned city space. In austere compositions, he allows visual elements and, by extension, the various temporal layers of Berlin’s urban development to collide. As in many of his works, Kirchner also deliberately seeks situations either awaiting a change in construction or demolition or having just undergone the same. Empty window openings, construction plans, scaffolding, and cranes herald this transformation.