It would be best if they all stayed here.

Not only the photos of Willi Moegle, which were the reason for the “photo thing.

The thing and its image” in the Institute for New Technical Form.

They have been part of the in-house collection for decades.

After all, Schwabe (1897–1989), who became a self-taught photographer, was one of the best-known product photographers of the post-war period.

Literally.

Christopher Schutte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

And, quite in the spirit of the leading designers of the time, such as Heinrich Loffelhardt, "who depicted good form in the manner of photography," as curator Ute Schauer puts it, who had the idea for this presentation dedicated to product photography, which is well worth seeing.

A show that, in addition to Moegle's downright classic new-objective commissioned works with glasses, bowls, coffee pots, carafes or vases, can also present the respective products from the collection of Germany's oldest design institute.

And that's already worth seeing enough.

"If it looks obvious, then it's the right thing to do," is Moegle's credo.

And indeed, whether he has staged ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers or glasses on a reflective surface in the black-and-white shots, there is obviously something to it.

Impressively good

However, a reasonably great, extremely stimulating exhibition only becomes possible with the curators' idea of ​​expanding the view from the 1960s to the immediate present.

Schauer, Anke Mensing and Ursula Raapke have invited eleven photographers and thirteen prospective product designers from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences to take a look at exhibits from the collection with their cameras.

And quite differently from what was presumably the entrepreneurial clients of the time, they gave the invited artists, portrait and architectural photographers a free hand, as did the student designers.

Not only in the selection of the motifs, but also in terms of the staging and each individual style.

Sure, here too a work like Wolfram Eder's photograph of Peer Clahsen's "Space Mill" designed in 1954 looks downright classic.

But when Ute Döring turns telephones from the 1960s into the protagonists of a story by Kurt Drawert, when Thomas Ott stages thermos flasks, stacking chairs and iMacs in the recycling yard instead of in the studio, or when Susanne Esche even presents handy models of classics such as the “Wire Chair” or Gerrit Rietveld's "Zig Zag Stoel" staged as if she hadn't studied in Essen and with Otto Steinert, but with Anna and Bernhard Blume, then that's pretty far removed from the product photography that followed the Bauhaus.

And yet it is great.

The Darmstadt-based photographer Albrecht Haag is even more experimental when, instead of using a studio camera, he trusts an app that calculates three-dimensional models from the scans of Jupp Ernst’s iconic Afri-Cola bottle, for example – and the missing data for the prints, well, let’s say , surprisingly creatively supplemented.

And by no means least, in the current positions, quite unlike in Moegle's time, color comes into play again and again instead of the setting in classic black and white modeled solely from light and shadow.

This applies to Gregor Schuster when he illuminates Reinhard Weiss' "Multiwind" downdraft extractor designed for Braun, as well as to numerous student works such as Laura Kutz' plastic watering cans in red, green and yellow or Alaleh Naghizadeh's citrus-fresh view of Philippe Starck's juicer.

Which doesn't mean that it's mainly or even exclusively colorful here.

Laurin Emmerich's photograph of Hilde Roth's simple yet elegant aluminum cans, for example, or Hans Hohmann's photograph of a mass product such as the light switch designed in the 1930s would certainly also find the blessing of Willi Moegle - and his industrial clients.

"A composition of objects worked out down to the smallest detail and a natural, formal lighting," Moegle says, "that's where I see the decisive characteristics of what is called the Moegle style." That sounds brittle.

And yet it looks amazing.

The exhibition at the Institute for New Technical Form, Darmstadt, Friedensplatz 11, is open until August 21, Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.