The SK Foundation in Cologne gives an insight into their collection
EThere are people who claim that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the exhibition “Comparative Concepts”, with which the Photographic Collection SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne gave an insight into the holdings for the first time in 1997, it was the other way around: hundreds of prints roared down the walls like a chorus with just one word: “Wumms !“ And as frightened as the captured ones, the visitors gasped at first. The show couldn’t have been better. With August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch as well as Bernd and Hilla Becher, the best that new objective documentary photography has produced in Germany and possibly worldwide was presented.
When the SK Stiftung Kultur declared almost a year ago that it was “ready” to work with the city of Düsseldorf and the local association for the founding and promotion of a German photo institute, which Andreas Gursky was pursuing – but not with the city of Essen, which was recognized by a commission of experts as location was preferred for such a facility – it was therefore long known what considerable assets WILL be used there. one cannot help but when the SK Stiftung Kultur, on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, is presenting two exhibitions of its collection, which has meanwhile forty thousand images, and in addition to the great birthday celebration, there is also a suspicion of a moment of propaganda. Almost four hundred portraits, landscapes and plant images by twenty-five photographers can now be seen, including early modern classics and numerous first, second and third generations of Becher students. The themes of architecture, industry and urban life are to follow from late summer.
Many of the recordings are recent acquisitions, all of which are committed to a factual, documentary-oriented, conceptual approach. What distinguishes them is that they endure as individual images. But it only showed its full effect in the methodically designed series. Offering opportunities for comparison BECOMES a principle for these photographers. Whereby behind their fidelity to the often strict procedure as well as to the motive once chosen, the hope of being able to draw conclusions that are generally valid and universal can be hidden.
August Sander’s typology “Face of Time” from the 1920s and early 1930s, which is spread out with an impressive bundle, becomes a precedent for the series for which he depicts a cross-section of society with representatives of professions, classes or social groups. His list of hundreds of categories ranges from the “cretin” and the henchman to the factory manager and politician, but some terms are also defined less concretely, “The woman in intellectual and practical work”. What resulted from this were portraits whose supposed truthfulness can sometimes hardly hide the proximity to the cliché. But that is outshined by the seriousness of the work.