The Entire City" is an IFA exhibition and is organized in cooperation with Goethe Institut-İstanbul

"The Entire City" exhibition is on view at Milli Reasürans Art Gallery between January 13 - February 28, 2011.

"The Entire City" exhibition is curated by Matthias Flügge who shall make a tour of the exhibition on January 13, 2011 between 17.00 and 18.00. Anybody interested can join this tour free of charge.

"The Entire City" is part of a new series of exhibitions dedicated to artistic photography in Germany. It brings together examples of subjective authorial photography, in which documentary moments encounter artistic interpretations. In contrast to the current widespread use of digitalization in making images, the six artist-photographers are committed to the observed, unmanipulated photographic image and the aesthetic particularities of its photochemical production. The exhibition "The Entire City" takes its title from a work by Max Ernst, with its impressive and oppressive vision of a dream metropolis where natural and cultural space merge. Urban culture and urban life also are the subject matters of the artists. They depict "their" city, the centre as well as the periphery, from entirely individual perspectives.

They do not simply portray what can be seen; rather, they illuminate aspects of cultural situations, and also of social and political situations, in today's Germany. Their common theme concerns questions of human identity and that of urban environment.

Zoltán Jókay, Andreas Rost, Maria Sewcz, Ulrich Wüst, Tomo Yamaguchi and Eva Bertram approach urban culture, current social and cultural questions they live in, with an individual yet distinctive eye: each of them records in his or her own way aspects of their reality that attract their attention. In so doing, they capture disparate components – cityscapes, architecture, portraits, contemporary history, society –turning their eyes towards people’s private spheres, and at times looking outward at inner city or suburban spaces. But always they single out everyday situations, never the exceptional or exalted moments. And precisely for that reason, they enable their pictures to tell stories.

Yet these photographers see themselves less as documentarists than as artists who are developing their own pictorial aesthetic, without staging their subjects or violating the dignity of those portrayed. Their works unite artistic quality with readability on a number of different levels. Along with the topical information about present-day Germany their pictures convey, the artist-photographers stand for contemporary artistic strategies that use narrative, representational structures to convey comprehensible access to their worlds of images.