Angela Strassheim, Hannah Starkey, Mohamed Bourouissa, Ryan McGinley, Anna Gaskell, Zanele Muholi
The exhibition Snapshots of a Generation aims to show various photographers who choose their generation as the subject of their photographs.
In the work of Ryan McGinley, Anna Gaskell, Hannah Starkey, and Angela Strassheim, timeless, almost dream-like sequences are created. The protagonists seem detached from clear localisations. Mohamed Bourouissa, and Zanele Muholi, on the other hand, seek out the concrete and direct. They photograph the protagonists in their everyday lives, in their stylisations by means of clothing and poses, in their way of staging themselves, yet in a setting where violence is always latently palpable.
The convergence of these different approaches raises questions about the role of the photographer. How close is the photographer to the protagonists? Does the artist become part of the project, as for example McGinley, who casts the teenagers in his photographs and travels with them for several weeks, or is the photographer rather an observer of a found situation? Are the idea and the choice of motif spontaneous, or are they the starting point of the work?
Hedonistic, open, and timeless scenes encounter a concrete everyday reality.
The result is a broad and diverse picture, a snapshot of a generation from many different perspectives, with no clear answers, with no evaluations.
