Dahlia Grugapark Essen, Germany

Abwärts

underground station // essen rüttenscheid

tile art and the underground, two things that are inseparable for me. although the station is from the late eighties, the pattern could also be from the post-war era.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Joachim Brohm explored the edges of the Ruhr area where landscape and man-made structures meet and oftentimes people spend their leisure time. From an elevated standpoint Brohm documented landscapes and how people used it and moved in it. Taking up the approach of the New Topographics Brohm captured what Heinz Liesbrock calls the „Topographies of Anonymity“, moments suspended in time showing people and objects in seemingly everyday situations. But what he puts on film is far from accidental: his well-composed landscape views in their restrained coloring document the parallel of man and nature in a landscape that is neither urban nor entirely rural. With it comes a nobility of the ordinary that even today, some 40 years after these photographs were shot, is fascinating and wonderfully compiled in the present volume: “Joachim Brohm - Ruhr”, published by Steidl Verlag in 2007. It reproduces about fifty of Brohm’s photographs from all over the Ruhr area ranging from wintery skating scenes reminiscent of Pieter Brueghel paintings to rowers at Lake Baldeney in Essen. The series is preceded by a very informative introduction by Heinz Liesbrock who breaks down the many influences and references present in Brohm’s work but also underscores the photographer’s audacity to use color film in times when black and white was still the standard. A great read and one of my all-time favorite photographic works.

Tales from my enchanted wasteland…. 

Komm, komm, komm, komm, Komm nach Hagen, werde Popstar, mach dein Glück!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9A01sVP3uM

Studies and private life

- History Studies

- Amsterdam

- Tomie (Junji Ito)

An old „Zeche“, a mining building, turned into a club for a night.

Auf die Freundschaft

Treue Freundschaft lebt in dem, der Freundschaft gibt, nicht in dem, der Freundschaft nimmt.              - Peter E. Schumacher -

Rombergpark Dortmund, Juni 2022

Members of the Red Ruhr Army during the Ruhr uprising, 1920

Spring In The Countryside

Spring in O.

emilienstraße // essen rüttenscheid

windows provide insights into the lives of the residents, but also leave room for interpretations and fantasies about life and living. the question remains: how much cream and eggnog will be served with sunday cake given the density of lace curtains in these windows?

In 1979, at the age of 24 and while still a student at Folkwang School Essen, Joachim Brohm set out to document the semi-private architecture of the Schreber gardens, the German equivalent to the allotment garden named after the physician Moritz Schreber. Likely inspired by the Bechers’s typologies of industrial architecture Brohm shows the often hand-built houses crowning in all of their variety: sometimes a mere hut, sometimes quite elobrate small houses these buildings and their surrounding gardens are the extended living rooms of their lodgers. Set against the neutral grey sky of the German winter Brohm approaches the houses from the gardens' gates and documents the various forms and shapes of the houses. But in contrast to the Bechers he never solely focuses on the architecture but also shows the interesting details and leftover artifcats present around the houses which tell of the life going on in and around them during spring and summer: footballs, lawn gnomes or simple vegetable beds immerse the viewer in the little stories hidden behind the walls and artifacts that are inextricably connected to the sphere of the Schreber gardens. Some might sniff at these identifiers of a petty bourgeois lifestyle but Brohm documents a grown cultural form that at the moment sees a revival among mostly well-educated urbanites.

That this early work of Joachim Brohm finally saw the light of day in 2014 is due to Mack Publishing who in close cooperation with the artist transferred his photographs into the present volume, fittingly entitled "Typology 1979". It gathers 35 Schreber garden photographs and a highly readable introduction to the series by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler who not only studied in the Ruhr area at the same time as Brohm did but also provides a historico-cultural excursus into the late 1970s Ruhr area and the Schreber gardens in particular, an essays that makes the book both a visual and intellectual pleasure!

IC735

The trailer of the documentary "Lancaster" (David Fairhead).