Photo exhibition “Along the Oder”: Old home, new home and people by the river

The photographers of the Ostkreuz Agency, founded in 1990 in reunified Berlin, with founding members such as Harald Hauswald and Ute and Werner Mahler, stand for documentary photography at the interface with art.

Instead of showing what life is like with journalistic flair, it’s about capturing moods, working with light and shadow, finding your own expression.

The Ostkreuz School, which emerged from the agency in 2005, also conveys this approach to its students. There are around 30 young photographers per semester who are trained in Berlin. Dealing with the technology is just one aspect that plays a role in photography, as students and course directors explain during the tour of the exhibition. But it is just as important to develop a feeling for moods, to learn how to find a topic in the first place, how to make something visible without depicting clichés.

The goal of a photographer today should be to create more interesting pictures than those that everyone snaps with their cell phones every day. This needs to be practiced just as much as exhibiting, framing, presenting. Project work is therefore an early part of the plan at Ostkreuz.

The photos had to be in the can in just three months

In the spring of 2022, 14 students made their way to the Oder region with their cameras. This is how the exhibition “Along the Oder” came about, which can now be seen at Neuhardenberg Castle in Brandenburg as the third station. The Oder region in the German-Polish border area harbors historical scars, heralds of reconciliation, is a rich cultural landscape, industrial location, recreation area, home.

The tragic highlight of attention was the fish die-off in the summer of 2022, from which it was initially not clear what had triggered it. It is now suspected that industrial salts introduced have led to the proliferation of a toxic species of algae. The students were out and about shortly before the environmental catastrophe. You don’t see their effects directly in the pictures, even if the relationship between people, nature, rivers and industry finds an echo in many of the motifs.

Of course, this is also about fish. Or rather, those who get them out of the water. Tim Gassauer photographed the anglers on the Oder, he visited clubs, was fascinated by a hobby that can be a bit chubby and rough, but at the same time is characterized by tranquility and the connection to the landscape.

Anglers belong to the Oder

The pictures he shows from his series are far beyond any fishing cliché. One shows the silvery body of a fish in a silvery net, the wire mesh sparkling in the light and merging with the surface of the water. An artistic, mysterious image that stands on its own. Another shows the upper body of a boy in a sporty dress. Probably when fishing, photographed from above due to the strong close-up, this is not so clear.

The aim of the photo project was to “rediscover” the Oder region. That sounds like a cliché itself. After all, who doesn’t want to see the world anew over and over again? If you measure the exhibition by its standards, it is a success. The twelve picture series show very different facets of the border region.

Different facets of the border region

Tanya Sharapova, who moved to Berlin from Moscow before the war against Ukraine, decided to photograph young Ukrainian refugees. She photographed girls and boys in front of and around a Red Cross refugee home in Frankfurt/Oder.

Florian Gazweiler and Alexander Levin had a similar concern. They found their protagonists on a playground in Slubice, on the Polish side of the border town. The portraits and landscape shots make it clear that you sometimes have to wait a long time for a good picture. Patience is required, many site visits, the ability to get in touch with people and gain their trust. In the pictures by Gazweiler and Levin, the young men are completely self-absorbed, they no longer notice the camera as they sit together in the open air.

Another series portrays people who have left Berlin and ended up in the Oderbruch. Another cliché that Nils Böddingmeier escapes by showing people from far away, sometimes just hiding the houses behind trees, a bloody toe in the grass.

Tin becomes gold

The “Midas” series by Louis Roth is poetic. He collected rusty finds from the Oder and portrayed them individually in front of a gray background in the studio – like King Midas’ pot of gold. The Oder has turned garbage into gold, that would be the romantic interpretation.

The Schloss Neuhardenberg Foundation, with event halls, hotel, Schinkelkirche, park and its own exhibition hall, has set itself the goal of giving photography space in the diverse artistic program with music, readings and art.

The photos are not hanging in the exhibition building itself, but in the foyer of the large hall, in the small orangery and in the corridor of the hotel, which sometimes suits them more, sometimes less, but offers a great course through the entire area.