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"Türken in Deutschland" Candida Höfer With her photos, the Cologne artist, Candida Höfer, focuses on public institutions and locations that store cultural knowledge, and on time and location-related cultural forms, such as museums, libraries or zoos. Her pictures are void of people, and only the objects allow conclusions to be drawn about their users. The early photo series “Turks in Germany”, on the other hand, shows how Turkish immigrants have influenced the picture of German cities. After an absence of some time, Höfer reported how surprised she was to see how visible migration has become in Cologne. The pictures have been taken since 1972, and for the first time Höfer showed a version of the 1975 series as a slide projection at the entrance gate to the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf. In 1979, a double projection was created from this, supplemented by the series “Turks in Turkey”. “Turks in Germany” consists of individual, group or family portraits at home or in the park, at the main station, in Turkish cafés and time and again in retail stores. The formally strict pictures let it be shown that most of the people were staged. They often look directly into the camera, they take a distinctive point in the room, or are arranged in groups. Here, Höfer plays with various forms of the private use of photography: again and again, the people are staged as in celebratory or official group photographs – not only in a photo studio or at well-known locations in the city, but in the urban area, at home and at their places of work. The short titles, e.g. “Ratingen 1976”, in turn, take up the convention of private albums, events marked only with a place and date. Contrary to the private quality of these albums, with a title such as this, Höfer raises the photographs to the status of the current representative picture of a town or urban area: Rudolfplatz Cologne, Düsseldorf main station, Pulverteich Hamburg. By playing with private and public codes in this way, and staging the pictures as official, she aggressively shapes a cultural commemoration. She will then, in her later work, photograph these institutions without people. |
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