The Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich faces a fundamental challenge: How do you attract visitors to a photography exhibition in an era of overwhelming visual content? Collection directors Simone Förster and Franziska Kunze, who oversee all photographic works at the museum, had to choose between a loud blockbuster approach featuring crowd-pleasing favorites or a quieter path of thoughtful juxtapositions that serves as an entertaining school of seeing.
Their answer becomes clear from the very entrance to the 'On View' exhibition. Instead of a large-format, color-intensive image greeting visitors at the top of the grand staircase, a smaller, detail-rich photograph hangs there, showing exactly what visitors are about to do: viewing an exhibition in a museum. Thomas Struth's famous 1990 photograph from the Art Institute of Chicago creates a mirror of the current situation, and the curators make their philosophy clear - this is not about overwhelming viewers, but about providing guidance for seeing, discovering, and ideally, thinking further.
Both curators have access to an enormous collection of photographic material spanning more than a century with thousands of works. Since its founding in 2002, the Pinakothek der Moderne has maintained a department for Photography and what is now called Time-Based Media. In the following two years, permanent loans from the corporate collections of Siemens and Allianz were added, focusing on photography since the 1970s. The collection received a massive expansion in 2010 through the photographic collection of gallery owners and collectors Ann and Jürgen Wilde, whose focus was on the modern period but also included artist archives of Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch.
The exhibition displays approximately 250 works by 66 artists across eight chapters, but everything is arranged with breathing room and careful attention to presenting connections and developing themes. Early photographic masterpieces like August Sander's 'People of the 20th Century' from the 1920s hang alongside Juan Pablo Echeverri's series 'futuroSEXtraños,' one of the collection's newest acquisitions made possible by the Pin Friends Circle. Just as Sander sought to typologize different professions a century ago, capturing them like stereotypes, Echeverri approaches stereotypes and cultural codes with subjects including a man in a hooded sweatshirt, a pierced punk with a sidecut, a little princess, someone with a mohawk, and a person wearing Mickey Mouse ears - all in black and white with a silhouette-like quality.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Karl Blossfeldt's sensational close-ups of seed pods from the 1930s meet Claus Goedicke's 2009 detail photographs of a dishrag and a blister pack of tablets. Jan Groover's extremely close-up table arrangement from 1979 encounters Florence Henri's still life from 1929. The exhibition moves from detail to expansiveness, where Andreas Gursky's famous monumental Rhine photograph, measuring three and a half meters wide, hangs near Albert Renger-Patzsch's industrial landscape, whose format in the late 1920s measured just 17 by 23 centimeters. The landscape room, titled 'Fragile Worlds,' also makes clear how dramatically natural spaces have changed through human intervention.
When addressing the human body, the curators avoid sensational effects and over-sexualized content, instead showing the diverse ways photographers have approached the human form over decades. Particularly striking is the interplay with cameras in the combination of Germaine Krull's famous 1925 self-portrait with her Icarette camera, Paul Mpagi Sepuya's 'Drop Scene' from 2018, and 'pinch' from 2024 by photographer Ludwig Dressler, born in 1998 - the latter also among the newest acquisitions through Pin.
Naturally, street photography cannot be missing from an exhibition about photography. Here, the collection directors can draw from abundant resources, spanning the arc of more than 100 years of photographic history. From Friedrich Seidenstücker's 'Puddle Jumper' and other socially critical street scenes through Lee Friedlander's 'Shadow - New York City 1966' and Ed Ruscha's artist book 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip' from the same year, the exhibition progresses to Jeff Wall's famous staged social criticism in his lightbox-presented neighborhood scene 'An Eviction' from 1988. In a class of its own is Gillian Wearing's series 'Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants to say' from the early 1990s, which finds technical continuation in a completely different way through Mame-Diarra Niang's 2020 series 'Call Me When You Get There.'
The content side is one matter, but technology is another entirely. The exhibition contains no photographs from photography's early period, as the Pinakothek der Moderne's holdings concentrate on the 20th and 21st centuries. Particularly in recent times, and especially since the deployment of AI, technology has crossed new attention thresholds. One need only remember the major 'Glitch' exhibition at the same location last year, which would now require significant additions to illustrate current technological trends.
While the curators have attempted to reach close to the present, they remain within traditional frameworks. This represents necessary criticism despite appreciation for the exhibition and its beautiful juxtapositions: The collection urgently needs new, more experimental positions to maintain connection with modernity. Otherwise, it risks being left behind. A bit of patina is fine, but it shouldn't appear dusty.
'On View: Encounters with the Photographic' runs at the Pinakothek der Moderne through October 12.
