Jump to

"This is not Herne" - exhibition by FH students

Fast facts

Organizer
Design

Information

Vernissage on February 18, 2024 from 5 pm
Exhibition runs until May 26, 2024
Opening hours Emschertal-Museum Unser Fritz; Unser-Fritz-Straße 108, 44653 Herne
Tuesdays to Fridays from 10 am to 1 pm and from 2 pm to 5 pm
Saturdays from 2 to 5 pm
Admission: 1.50 euros adults, 0.50 euros reduced

About the exhibition

"This is not Herne" was the maxim with which young photographers from Fachhochschule Dortmund embarked on a confrontational journey, adopting a wide variety of photographic positions. The focus was on overcoming and/or reinterpreting the folklore of the Ruhr region, as well as exploring the photographic material itself: the students draw an arbitrary boundary in the Ruhr continuum and show everything that Herne is not or does not want to be. "This is not Herne" is also a challenge to entrenched photographic positions and perspectives. "This is not Herne" is an openness to technology and points of view that aims to overcome entrenched structures.

In the vehement negation, behind the no in the affect
actually reveals a big YES:
a yes to the new,
a yes to change,
a YES to overcoming what is always the same.

In their work processes, the students were challenged to break completely new ground, they searched city archives, researched on site, made contact with citizens, sat at regulars' tables, made wild phone calls, questioned everything and despaired - only to come up with the best new idea shortly afterwards. All these crazy ideas were taken seriously in the context of the seminar by Herne city photographer Thomas Schmidt and Prof. Kai Jünemann from Fachhochschule Dortmund and worked out together. The visual solutions were just as diverse as the city itself, they show everything that Herne is not and yet enable an extremely precise description.

Some students also said no to outdated image-generating technologies; photographers can now create images without cameras. Points of reference to the all-pervasive digitality and the almost sacred promise of truth of photography form a conceptual foundation on which this exhibition is based: The once so rigid boundaries of the classic photography discipline become permeable. Our digital environment and the analog city corpus, AI-generated portrait photography and archive material, documentary photography and staged fashion photography: everything merges and becomes

This is not Herne.