© Gosbert Adler
Zone E Kahrstr. 54 D-45128 Essen Allemagne
Gosbert Adler’s internationally acclaimed photography questions reality without claiming to offer definitive answers. His pictures depict seemingly trivial, mundane scenes. Always serial and limited to a few themes, they explore the specific aesthetic scope of photography, which sees itself as documentary and is aware of its absolute subjectivity. In his conscious choices of perspective, detail, focus and colour, Adler constantly reflects the possibilities and constraints of his medium. As Thomas Weski wrote in his essay in the catalogue for the exhibition Gosbert Adler – Die Zelle at Hanover’s Sprengel Museum in 1994: “Gosbert Adler’s images represent an attempt to redefine photography in its purest form. By focusing on seemingly banal themes and showing visual appreciation for the culture of everyday, they represent a strategy of refusing that photography has already said and shown everything.”
The exhibition at Zone E in Essen shows autobiographical photographs from the 1980s, presented in a new edition. After Adler’s graduation in 1981, they won him his first scholarship – the Award for Contemporary German Photography from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Stiftung.