The House of Photography Hamburg

With the opening of the House of Photography in the southern Deichtorhalle, Hamburg gained a top-class exhibition center dedicated to the medium of photography in 2003. The House of Photography presents international temporary exhibitions on photography, ranging from historical works of the 19th and 20th centuries to young contemporary photographers and aspects of the digital revolution.

The House of Photography was largely conceived by F.C. Gundlach, founding director of the House of Photography and artistic director from 2003 to 2005, where he curated, among other things, the reopening exhibition "Martin Munkácsi: Think While You Shoot!"

The conversion of the southern Deichtorhalle into the House of Photography was carried out by Hamburg architect Jan Störmer in 2004 and 2005. At the moment, the House of Photography is undergoing fundamental reconstruction, after reopening it will offer exhibition spaces, an auditorium, a collection library, a specialist bookstore for photography and art, and a bistro-restaurant.

In October 2009, Dirk Luckow took over as artistic director of the Deichtorhallen. He is supported by Nadine Isabelle Henrich as curator and Sabine Schnakenberg as curator of the F.C. Gundlach Collection at the House of Photography.

With the founding of the House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2003, F.C. Gundlach made his private collection available to the house as a permanent loan under the motto "The Image of Man in Photography" – a world-renowned collection in the fields of fashion photography and artistic photography.

The mission of the House of Photography is to present the collection and its inherent thematic complexes to an interested public. Since 2003, numerous exhibitions have been compiled from the collection's holdings, including A Clear Vision (2003) and The Heartbeat of Fashion (2006), which provided an overview of the collection's holdings. Projects such as Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel (2009), Nobuyoshi Araki: Silent Wishes (2010), and Saul Leiter (2012) each incorporated works from the collection's holdings. Exhibitions such as American Beauties (2007), Maloney, Meyerowitz, Shore, Sternfeld – New Color Photography of the 1970s (2008), Harry Callahan (2013), The Concept of Lines: Richard Avedon, George Hoyningen-Huene, Irving Penn (2016), and Street.Life.Photography (2018) presented special photo-historical and thematic aspects of the collection.