Max Regenberg
Versprechen - Wirklichkeit
15.11.2015 – 10.01.2016

The exhibition “Promise - Reality” in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven brings together current and early photographs by the photographer Max Regenberg from his well-known work series Billboards.
Max Regenberg, born in Bremerhaven in 1951, lives and works in Cologne. After training as an advertising photographer, he emigrated to Ottawa, Canada in 1977. There he was confronted with a media world that was far ahead of the European one. Even then, oversized billboards populated the streets, and private television channels broadcast commercials incessantly. The experience of this unleashed flood of images fundamentally changed Regenberg’s view of the medium of photography. The result was an unprecedented long-term documentary study of billboards in public spaces, which Max Regenberg continues to this day.
Be it advertising columns in inner cities or billboards in urban outskirts, Max Regenberg opens our eyes to the promises of advertising in his works, only to break those promises of happiness, freedom or wealth again, because the reality captured in the image all too often contradicts the longings created. The compositions of his landscape photographs are often based on chance and yet meaningful encounters; for example, top model Naomi Campbell is not really to be expected on a busy and heavily polluted country road. But in Regenberg’s work, not all posters advertise a popular brand; white billboards repeatedly appear as blind windows: for example in a never-before-seen row of a total of ten billboards that stood - robbed of any message - in a Vienna city train station. Other billboards seem to address the viewer directly through writing: be it questions or appellative sentences that force the passer-by to engage in a direct debate, ask them to take a stand, even put themselves in the picture. But Max Regenberg’s original intention is more fundamental. He himself does not use the poster, which is generally understood as photography in public space (the Benetton advertisement is an example here), to explore the essence of advertising; this debate was already discussed extensively in the 1970s. Rather, he is interested in a kind of photographic turn, the recognition of a shift towards the phenomenon of photography as the leading medium of public culture. It should be noted in this discourse that the poster as a medium significantly drove this paradigm shift in photography. Max Regenberg’s works accompanied and documented this development from an early stage.

Dagmar Kürschner

Curated by Klaus Becké.