The Photographer Hans Meyer-Veden

With his camera, Hans Meyer-Veden captured Hamburg in its transformation and thus wrote his own city history: of the Elbe, the harbor, the Speicherstadt, the Kontorhäuser and, last but not least, his home district of Altona.

"I live in Ottensen in Altona, and the photographs were taken around this focal point, like markers of a network of paths, places, and moments. Traces of a reassurance. Excavations into the how of one's own life, into the where and the why." (Hans Meyer-Veden 2008)

Born in Stade in 1931 and moving to Altona in 1982, Hans Meyer-Veden captured urban space in all its diversity and change in his own unique visual language. He created ciphers of a city – detailed shots and views that combine to create a subjective overall picture. His photographic explorations derive their tension from the contrast between finely crafted aesthetics on the one hand and a striving for objective representation on the other. The absence of people is striking: unlike the proponents of classic street photography, Hans Meyer-Veden did not focus his images on the city's inhabitants. He himself explained this particular approach as a "radical shift in the use of photography," which he felt was necessary in 1982 when encountering the big city: away from the "aesthetics of a representative moment" and toward an "observation focused on the whole."

Hans Meyer-Veden's images invite the viewer to "contemplate them with their minds, to read them, and to decipher them." This means a search for a city's history in images that does not exalt architectural representation, but rather archives, as memory, the social processes of an urban society manifested in the cityscape.

In Hans Meyer-Veden's eyes, urban space, right down to its naturally sprawling edges, is a human-made product, shaped by the constant activity and shaping of a restless collective. As a seeker of traces, he is less interested in the smooth surface, but rather celebrates the joy of transformation with a positivist curiosity. Nowhere could Hans Meyer-Veden have better captured his photographic explorations than in Hamburg: the city on the river, which is itself a metaphor for dynamism, for the constant arrival and departure.