When we had parked on Eiserntalstrasse for some time, stayed in the car when it rained to chat, and got out between the showers to take a few photos of the houses along the street, at some point a door opened and it came an elderly gentleman came out, went down two or three steps, looked at us sharply with a mixture of curiosity and skepticism, barely noticeably shook his head, and even before we could have lowered the window to say hello and perhaps to have a conversation with him entangled, he was back in his house.
Click, and the door was closed.
But what could we have asked him?
What is it like to live in a house that the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher helped achieve museum honors with their typology of half-timbered houses in Siegerland?
Freddy Langer
Editor in the features section, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".
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Is it more common for strangers to inspect one's home as if they were real estate agents looking for material for their business and not art lovers?
Since the Museum of Contemporary Art in Siegen and City Marketing launched a brochure in 2017 with images of all the Becher pictures from the Eiserfeld district, taken in the sixties and seventies, supplemented by a city map and exact address details, a number of admirers should be strictest documentary photography misunderstood this as an invitation to breach the peace and climb over garden fences.
After all, the Bechers would also have photographed the rear of the building.
Invitation to breach the peace
The museum asked the Siegen photographer Thomas Kellner to take pictures of all the houses in their current condition for this brochure. Waiter is no stranger; on the contrary. He has earned some fame with architectural shots of such famous buildings as Tower Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge, the White House in Washington, the Sydney Opera House and the Eiffel Tower, all of which he dismantled into confusing patterns on contact sheets from 35mm films . In this commissioned work, however, nothing was further from him than artistic self-realization. Unlike the Bechers, he therefore photographed in the sunshine, with all the shadows and depths that the glaring light created. And in color. “It was street photography,” says Kellner today, exaggeratedly modest. Art is great above, reality is small below,that was his concept for the pages of the brochure. The pairs of pictures illustrate in the most wonderful way the convincing effectiveness with which modern windows instead of old lattice frames, fiber cement panels instead of half-timbering or style-free porches for the entrance can ugly a facade with just a few renovation moves.
Then came Corona. And when Thomas Kellner was leafing through his electronic image archive during the lockdown, he had an idea. He pulled out the recordings from 2015 and began to alienate them. Not to work on, as he says, but to process it. First he reduced the color to close to black and white, then he blurred the surroundings of the houses so that the buildings in the artificially created space look strangely small and lost. While Bernd and Hilla Becher saw the houses as a model of living culture and not only paid attention to the variety of shapes of the facades in their typology, but also let the residents tell them the history of the houses, Kellner quickly transformed them into model houses. With an amazing effect. The Bechers approached with the distant,sober look of photogrammetry, scientific image measurement. Kellner, on the other hand, looks at his homeland with a romantic, glorified view of all things via the detour of electronic data processing. How cute, you are tempted to say. Despite all unsuccessful renovations.
“Half-timbered houses in the Siegen industrial area today” by Thomas Kellner. Verlag Seltmann Publishers, Berlin 2021. 56 pages, 19 photographs. Paperback, 25 euros.