Milan Horacek

Extreme sharpness and refinement of colour nuances - large-format photography is the medium of choice for the detailed reproduction of urban landscapes. One of its pioneers in Germany in the late 1970s was the Hamburg photographer Milan Horacek. In stylistic proximity to the "new colour photography" of Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, he worked with the large format early on and pursued his programme independently of the photographers of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, who also began experimenting with large-format cityscapes in colour shortly afterwards. In 1981, Horacek was commissioned by a travel magazine to produce a series of more or less conventional Hamburg motifs. While he was still working on the project, however, he began to create a subjective counter-image of the city, using his plate camera to photograph a non-representative Hamburg outside the editorial brief: wasteland and firewalls, industrial and street landscapes outside the city centre, the residential buildings of the Gründerzeit and pre-war period as well as the bright clinker bricks of the 1950s and 1960s. The pictures in this book liberate urban situations from their apparent banality and draw the eye to the topographical detail. For today's viewer, they are also snapshots of Hamburg's development before the boom years following reunification. Elaborate analogue technology and the high costs of large-format photography forced the photographer to prepare each individual shot precisely. This resulted in large, calm images of high formal quality and extreme concentration.