There comes a day in every photographer's life when the mass of his images overwhelms him and the memory of the work begins to occupy as much space in his mind as the forward-looking vision.
Then it's sorting: the remaining plans – and the accumulated material.
Good for those who can set up their own room for this.
As a perfectly equipped workshop?
As a well sorted archive?
Or as a spacious exhibition hall?
The solution that Horst Hamann found for himself meets all of these requirements in equal measure.
And even puts a cinema on top.
And because he makes the whole thing accessible to the public, one can speak of a small museum with a clear conscience.
Freddie Langer
Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Reiseblatt”.
Follow I follow
A sign “Here is New York” is programmatically emblazoned above the entrance.
But if you start the tour through the huge halls at the back left, you will remain stuck in Mannheim for at least a moment.
Or the region.
Because there are eighty-eight compartments with picture boxes and negative folders that go back to 1975, when Horst Hamann played semi-professionally for the 09 Weinheim football club.
In the third or fourth compartment, however, like a relic, that piece of cardboard with the inscription “Looking for a Ride to New York”, with the help of which Hamann looked for a ride after a photography workshop in Maine in the early 1980s and found it and gave his life a new direction with the trip.
For twenty-four years he stayed in New York, the city
Suddenly Heidi Klum is at the door
When Horst Hamann talks about New York, one anecdote follows the other, whether as an assistant in his first job on the eightieth floor of the World Trade Center he had to change films for a photographer and make coffee and couldn't take the picture of which he still believes might have been his best, gazes at the spiers of the city that proudly stretch through a blanket of clouds.
Or whether he reports on Heidi Klum, who had sent him to his studio by a French agency, under the mistaken belief that he was the fashion photographer Horst.
He sat at the home of Andreas Feininger, whose New York book made him dream of America for the first time as a teenager, and he designed a skateboard with Adam Schatz and Eli Morgan Gesner that has since become a cultural treasure in the Smithsonian collection:
with a slim photo on the bottom of the board that, while missing from the city skyline, still has the Twin Towers reflected in a puddle.
They had called it "Unbreakable".
That was the time of the vertical, which became something like Hamann's trademark.
In the 1990s he photographed Manhattan with a panorama camera, but tilted the camera by ninety degrees and thus interpreted New York in a way strangely enough nobody had done before, although only now was the image of the city striving towards the sky adequately implemented.
The photo book, almost half a meter high but less than twenty centimeters wide, is now one of the best-selling photo books in history.
From then on, the motifs not only decorated diners and rest stops all over the world, but also bed linen and ties.
Now they are hanging, meter-sized, in the center of a self-curated retrospective.
Framed by examples from other Hamann series such as the musician portraits,
the color shots of traffic in the snowy city or the bold perspectives for which he balanced on the raptor heads of the Chrysler Building.
And there are documentaries showing New Yorkers explaining their relationship to the vertical - in a cinema as narrow as a broom closet, as steep as the Giza pyramids and as high as a dance hall.
The screen is three and a half meters high, but only one and a half meters wide.
You won't find that anywhere else in the world, says Horst Hamann and later calls out, in farewell: "Stay vertical!"
as steep as the Pyramids of Giza and as high as a ballroom.
The screen is three and a half meters high, but only one and a half meters wide.
You won't find that anywhere else in the world, says Horst Hamann and later calls out, in farewell: "Stay vertical!"
as steep as the Pyramids of Giza and as high as a ballroom.
The screen is three and a half meters high, but only one and a half meters wide.
You won't find that anywhere else in the world, says Horst Hamann and later calls out, in farewell: "Stay vertical!"
Gallery New York, Fritz-Salm-Strasse 3, Mannheim. Open Thursday from 5pm to 8pm, Saturday from 12pm to 5pm, Sunday from 2pm to 6pm. Information on the Internet: www.gallery-ny.com.