Dirk Reinartz: Photographing, what is

From September 7th to November 16th, 2025, the exhibition will be on display at its second venue, the Kunsthalle Erfurt.

Jena and Erlangen: They are only 150 kilometers apart as the crow flies. Both are old university towns. Both are dominated by an industrial giant. The town twinning has existed since 1986, and on the occasion of its revival, the editors of ZEITmagazin ask: How close are these two neighboring cities across the former German-German border, really? How different is everyday life?

Reinartz portrayed representatives of the same professions in the two cities. The cover image shows Peter Zorn, owner of more than a hundred shops belonging to the "PGH Haarkosmetik" (PGH = Production Cooperative of Crafts), welcoming us into his salon. Also pictured is Erlangen's master hairdresser, Adolf Hanneberger, wearing an extravagant kimono-style smock.

Dirk Reinartz (1947–2004) is one of the most important photojournalists and visual authors of the late Federal Republic and reunified Germany. Whether in his early commissioned work – he was hired by Stern magazine at just 23 years old as its youngest photojournalist – or in his independent photo series, Dirk Reinartz succeeded in capturing socio-political developments, cultural upheavals, and concrete life situations of people in subtle photographic narratives through a precise and pointed visual language.

A central theme in Reinartz's work is his engagement with Germany and the Germans. Throughout his life, he searched for motifs that reveal a German identity, with all its contradictions and historical roots. This also includes German-German relations, which were a recurring subject of his photojournalistic work, for example in articles about East German resettlers (1984), people in the twin cities of Jena and Erlangen (1987), resettlers from West to East Germany (1989), and the border region between East and West Germany (1983). With German reunification in 1990, he continued his comparative approach, examining differences and commonalities and observing the processes of a unified German society coming to terms with the situation.

From May to September 2024, the Landesmuseum Bonn dedicated a retrospective to him. It was the first comprehensive look at his oeuvre twenty years after his untimely death. The Kunsthalle Erfurt is now showing this exhibition until November 16, 2025.

An exhibition by the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn, the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and the German Photo Library in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Erfurt .

Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday: 11 am – 6 pm
Thursday: 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.