The German Photo Institute in Düsseldorf defies description. It could only be captured in the picture, by a master photographer. Thomas Demand, for example: paper replica of a desk in the twilight, slide boxes poured out onto it and blank sheets of paper. Or Thomas Struth: Museum visitors with Kö shopping in front of black and white photos of subsidy silos. Or Thomas Ruff: a hundred euro note, inflated to the size of the Mao portrait from Tiananmen Square. A close-up always looks the most! Unless Barbara Klemm pressed the shutter release: Monika Grütters in the center of a group of seats, her chin on her hand, surrounded by advisors on all sides - only the armchair next to her unoccupied.
But of course the founder of the registered association for a German Photo Institute in Düsseldorf will not let himself be deprived of the subject: The pre-modern brick of the courtyard in the most magnificent velvet red, in front of it a dam wall concreted with Photoshop, which repels every flood - the manipulated eye lock is an unmistakably real Gursky.
Since the state minister for culture announced in summer 2019 that the federal government wanted to found a federal institute for photography, the city of Düsseldorf has been using tricks to force its establishment on the Rhine. Even before the expert commission appointed by Grütters had submitted its recommendations, Johannes Kahrs, a member of the Bundestag who was notorious as a virtuoso of the hands-on redistribution of tax money, obtained an allowance of 41.5 million euros in the budget committee, tied to the Düsseldorf location. Although the experts and the feasibility study by a consulting firm voted for Essen, Grütters invited interested parties to a summit. The Lord Mayor of Düsseldorf Stephan Keller canceled his participation at short notice. What authority does he mean by the empty chair politics?
With the overpriced purchase of duplicates from a gallery specializing in photography for the Museum Kunstpalast, the city only demonstrated its claims, but not its competence. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Keller disapproved of the fact that Grütters was planning “a kind of federal archive”, while Düsseldorf was looking at the future of photography. The mockery of the Grütters slogan of the “Marbach of Photography” falls back on Keller, who apparently does not know that the photographers most urgently want their prints and files to be preserved. Keller makes a figure like the typical tourist Martin Parrs, who shimmers everywhere in the hunt for photo trophies. He should be happy when nobody snaps him.