Gelsenkirchen.
Hardly anyone has shaped the image of the area as intensively as Joachim Schumacher. An exhibition in Gelsenkirchen shows 130 of his best pictures.
The wild brats from the extremely poor zinc smelting settlement in the north of Essen grilled something on a plastic-coated basket, Joachim Schumacher still remembers today, a good 50 years after he took the photo. And then there’s the view of one of those wildly sprawling industrial estates of today, without a hint of architectural structure, but with the usual general assembly
of shrill, shrill luminous colors that in principle never go together. “But in the Ruhr area they are a bit louder than elsewhere,” says Joachim Schumacher with a smile that expresses love and ironic distance from the area at the same time.
The photographer, born in Saarbrücken in 1950, is one of the last students of the legendary Folkwang photography teacher Otto Steinert. He really wanted to make him a photojournalist. But Joachim Schumacher remained stubborn. Documentary is his field of work and life. show what is. hold on for all time. The sober paradox of the photo between the moment and eternity. The melancholy of precision. Story told beyond accounting and imagination.
Joachim Schumacher says: It was about the money, regardless
There is probably no photographer who has shaped the image of the Ruhr area as much as Joachim Schumacher, both internally and externally. He photographed a number of advertising campaigns for what is now the Ruhr Regional Association, when it was still called the Ruhr Area Municipal Association – beautiful pictures of the blue sky over the Ruhr and the wide green areas below, which were no more lies than the series that Joachim Schumacher photographed freely – of his own accord , with insatiable curiosity, in ceaseless amazement at this unique urban landscape. Where everything seemed to be huge, the profits and the poverty, first the industry and then the wastelands, the landscapes and the problems. “You could see that it was all about money, you didn’t pay any attention to anything and you created a hopeless structural chaos,” says Schumacher. From the jumble of pipes to residential machines under chimneys to the tangled mess of tiny allotment gardens in front of gigantic blast furnaces.
130 of his pictures, which also went into the pixel project Ruhrgebiet in series, the region’s Internet image store, can now be seen on the almost kilometer-long corridor on the ground floor of the science park in his chosen hometown of Gelsenkirchen. “I could have equipped the upper floor as well,” says Joachim Schumacher without showing off. Anyone who knows his pictures also suspects that he had to sort out a lot of good shots for this exhibition: “My important things are there,” he smiles, “just not all of them”.
Joachim Schumacher is fascinated by dirty corners
Peter Liedtke, organizer of the exhibition and pixel project, values Schumacher’s “critical, very analytical view” of his surroundings. Today he himself often thinks about a picture: “It’s good that I took it – you have no idea how much things are changing!” live and since 2000 also in color, in nothing but still images, so to speak. Schumacher is particularly interested in the unspectacular, the ever rarer dirty corners fascinate him. Why? “Because so little has changed in them, because so many layers of time are stored in them.”
The photographer is probably one of the few who can also discover a downside to the blue sky over the Ruhr and the improvement in the air below: “This diffuse light due to the many dirt particles in the air when there was no wind was actually better for taking pictures. Now the nuances in the sky are missing that were there then.”
Joachim Schumacher fears that there will be more and more cases in the area like everywhere else
Schumacher photographed the massive upheavals and demolitions of the 1980s, as well as the epochal changes that went hand in hand with the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park and the Capital of Culture Ruhr.2010. But Joachim Schumacher also has this eye for the special detail, the picnic tables in the almost endless Ruhr meadows of Duisburg, the symphony of satellite dishes in Herne, the rampant birch forests in the track bed, the tangled knotted oak branches in front of the right angles and merciless straights of Zollverein.
There are also series from the coal areas of his native Saarland (where things were more rural and fragmented) and in Charleroi in Belgium (where the impoverishment was much greater) or from the Rhenish lignite area (where the destruction of the landscape went much further). But Joachim Schumacher’s actual territory remains the Ruhr area, even if he is concerned with an observation that was already the subject of a legendary photo exhibition in the 1980s: “It’s becoming more and more common here than everywhere else. I see fewer and fewer motives.”
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