 I'm taking you all to Germany, to the force field of contemporary photography. Can I, at this point, just ask for raised hands? Can you tell me if you know about the Düsseldorf school? OK, thank you. So you won't be surprised if I say that the force field refers to Düsseldorf, my museum's home base, where I worked for 12 years before I eloped to Glasgow. And for the past four years, I've also worked very closely with the imaging lab griger that we kept talking about today. And it happens to be based in Düsseldorf, and it's also the place where, as Alex put it, all our favorite Germans have their works produced. So this Wall Street Journal weekend supplement, it shows, on its title page, a visitor dwarfed by Andreas Gorski's work Pyeongyang One. And it subtitles the feature, Düsseldorf Photographers Really Find the Art. In this talk, I would like to explore this phenomenon a little. Recent exhibitions and publications exploring what gave rise to this focused mostly on the influence of Bernd and Hiller-Becher as teachers at the Kunstakademie. That's the art school in Düsseldorf. I will make a case for an underexplored factor in the rise of Düsseldorf photography, this being the unique circumstances of fabrication that were available there. In my timeline here, I chose 1957 as the benchmark year. It was then that Bernd and Hiller-Becher met in Düsseldorf. From 1959, they started working together, commencing their lifelong project on documenting industrial architecture in black and white photographs. The imaging lab Grieger opened shop in Düsseldorf in 1968. In 73, the DSK face mounting process was patented in Switzerland. And Grieger soon got the license to produce them. In 76, the Kunstakademie created the first chair of photography in Germany for Bernd-Becher. And young photographers flocked to join his class immediately. And then you see Jeff Ward's famous work, The Destroyed Room, below the 1978 marker. I put that there because in the early 80s was when Jeff Ward's and Siddhi Sherman's works were shown in Europe for the first time in commercial galleries in Cologne. The next image at the 87 marker is a Thomas Roof portrait. This is the year he managed to dramatically increase the format of his portrait prints in collaboration with Grieger. In the mid-90s, the Dorst-Lamda Digital and Larger became an available enabling artist to produce prints with a maximum width of 180 centimeters. So if it's technically possible, an artist will embrace it, right? Enter Andreas Gorski's May Day, measuring 8.7 by 16.5 feet. In the early 2000s, Grieger went on to acquire the world's largest digital and larger, the LightJet XL, pictured at the top right, which can print the format as large as 5.9 by 9.8 feet. And we're not stopping there. Available since 2011, latex printing technique allows for even larger formats. But back to the Bechers. This is an image from the Bechers retrospective at the Kunstsammlung in 2004. It shows a number of their typologies, probably the format of presentation the Bechers are most famous for. Their gelatin silver prints were produced in a standard format, placed in mats and white metal frames, and arranged serially in grid format to emphasis subtle variations in types of industrial architecture. So even though the individual prints fairly small, the entire block takes up the wall space of a large painting. From 76 onwards until 1994, the Bechers taught at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Their former students are often referred to as Becher students. And for the entire group of artists, the label Becher School or Düsseldorf School are quite common. The first students of Bernd and Heller Bechers were Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruf, Axel Hütte, Thomas Struht, and a little while later, Andreas Gursky. They are referred to as the first generation Becher class. Taught immaculate technique and influenced by the Becher's aesthetic, their teacher's work was the foundation of their own work. Most of the group went to work with color film right from the start. The both Thomas Struht and Axel Hütte have worked extensively in black and white, too. Scale was an issue that they were interested in early on, and they have been pushing the boundaries of format relentlessly. Entering the art world at a time of the omnipresence of visual information, this group turned to the craft's latest technical developments to create really monumental works. And I think they were no small measure influenced by the practice of North American artists. In the early 60s, Dan Graham and Ed Rochet photographed local sites like gas stations or housing developments. Their snapshot documentary concept of taking series of images really resonated in Europe. Thomas Struht has said in an interview, and I'm quoting now, I decided to photograph 49 streets to make a block of seven by seven street photographs with a centered perspective, one conceptual idea, like the 26 gasoline stations by Ed Rochet, an artist in whom I was quite interested at that time. I went out with the minolta and decided to take photographs throughout the city of Düsseldorf without selecting any particular street. I just put it on the street with a central perspective and made an exposure. I did not care very much whether certain buildings were in the frame or not, or whether a car disturbed the photograph or not. It was very conceptual work. It seems obvious that the use of color photography as employed by Cindy Sherman also greatly influenced the Becher class. Early on, she used bright colors and large formats to question the image of women in our advertisement orientated consumer society. Sherman's work was presented in Cologne from the early 1980s onwards by Spruitt-Marcus Gallery. Jeff Wall, moving from showing his images as color prints in 1967 to color transparencies in light boxes in 78, was also exhibiting in Cologne in the early 80s. The presentation mode of his images in the light box was almost cinematic, a cool, precise image glowing on the wall. These pioneers were presenting photographic works that were both physically and formally much closer to paintings. To recap, the young artists were part of a serious artistic community in Düsseldorf and exposed early on to the exciting developments of their North American counterparts. But there was also Grieger. This is the very place, the outside of it. This lab was a thriving enterprise by the mid-70s and one that the local commercial photographers were all using to develop their prints. And then the young artists flocked in. The students who started working with color films fairly soon after joining the Becher class went to have their prints developed here as there was no color-developing equipment at the school. So I would very much like to argue for the fact that the students had the benefit of really gifted teachers, for sure. But they also had at their disposal a lab with state-of-the-art facilities, which was really devoted to working with artists even in the very early days. So let's talk about those Becher students. Thomas Ruff was the first of the students to experiment with scale. And these color headshots of his fellow students actually did not begin large. But he kept experimenting with size a lot. And in 1968, he managed to make five prints on the largest photo paper available, 150 by 180 centimeters. And he discovered that a real new picture had emerged through the enlargement. The look and expression of the sitters was intensified. And the visual presence of the photograph became really dominant. Ruff had them first matted and framed in the traditional way. But he soon noted that, and that's a quote, if the humidity went up and the sun came out, the paper moved. At this point, he was advised by the technicians at Grieger that there was a certain finishing technique that was used in advertising that held photos flat and also created this brilliant, saturated finish. And this was the moment that face mounting with acrylic sheets entered the art world. Ruff was also the first to standardize the presentation by framing his finished face-mounted works with heavy wooden frames, cementing their object status. Thomas Ruff still lives and works in Dusseldorf and has his face-mounted works produced by Grieger. Axel Hütte studied at the Kunstakademie between 76 and 79 and soon joined the Becher class. Clearly influenced by the works of Bernd and Hiller Becher, he started his artistic research in urban settings, photographing housing interiors and industrial establishments with an objective documentary style. Hütte worked in black and white until 1992, moving on to color photography as he turned to photographing landscapes. Today, he used inkjet technology to produce his large format prints while he still lives in Dusseldorf. He has his prints produced by Recomart in Berlin. Candida Höfer joined the Becher class in 76. Documenting interiors of public buildings, she used color film departing from a teacher's choice of black and white for documentary style photographs. Candida Höfer lives in Cologne but has her prints developed in Dusseldorf. She does not use the finishing technique on her works. Thomas Strudt was one of the first students to join the Becher class. His early works of street photography is very much carried out in the Becher style. He started to work with color film in the late 1980s. Regarding scale, he was quick to follow Ruf's example, producing his first large format print in 89, one of the earliest ones we're looking at here. Today, he varies his print sizes. If a subject calls for it, he will print as monumental as possible. Even though he moved his home and his studio to Berlin in 2010, he still has his face mounted works produced by Grieger. Andreas Gurski joined the Becher class in 1980. He started working with color film as soon as he commenced his studies in Dusseldorf. From about 84 onwards, his prints are starting to increase in size. He has made use of image processing software ever since it became available in 1990. Gurski still lives and works in Dusseldorf. He's the first of the group to use direct printing, but has his face mounted works still produced by Grieger. And obviously, not only Becher students work with large-scale photography, someone else who was based in Dusseldorf for a long time and who's in our collection is Thomas Demant. He studied sculpture at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie. And he uses, as you probably know, colored paper and cardboard to create models of entire rooms or hallways or outside areas. And he has those large models photographed and then destroys the models and the photographs become the actual artwork. He lives in Berlin and Los Angeles and still has his work produced by Grieger. So when did large-format photography enter the Kunstsamlung's collection? Katharina Sieverding, Staufenberg block, a wall-spanning 16-panel piece work was actually the first acquisition. It was part of a 97, 98 solo exhibition at the Kunstsamlung. You can see it on the left of this archival image here. So the big pictures entered the Kunstsamlung's collection quite late compared to major North American institutions who I think started collecting in the early 90s. Today, the Kunstsamlung holds 67 photographic artworks, though I would like to point out that many of them are multi-piece works. But if we just go by accession number, the largest group of photographic works are actually face-mounted chromogenic prints and there are no laminated ones, only face-mounted with PMMA works. The face-mounted works held in the Kunstsamlung's collection were produced between 1989 and 2010, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the development and DSAC technology for a minute. Large prints require a certain stiffness, or they will curl and sag as Thomas Roof discovered early on. So the DSAC face-mounting system seems like an ideal solution. Early Gorski and Roofworks tend to have no secondary support apart from an asset-free cardboard as their prints are always replaced in heavy wooden frames. Strut also tends to go without a backing unless he goes extra large. These works are mounted on debond for support. It is worth noting that the Alu-debond backing makes the work much heavier and accordingly more difficult to handle. It's also more expensive to make. Thomas Demand, on the other hand, has always shown his face-mounted work. Oh, excuse me. Thomas Demand has always shown his face-mounted works unframed. He uses a custom-made hanging system on the reverse to float his works off the wall. This has to be adhered to something, obviously, and the solution he developed with Grieger was to laminate the sandwich onto stiff support. In the early days, this was Forex. Then sheet of opaque PMMA. He has changed to Alu-debond when the material entered the market in the late 90s. His early works, which are backed with other materials than debond, are quite prone to structural problems. And with the artists pushing forever larger images, Grieger developed the splice technique to achieve truly monumental sizes. Splicing is the method of joining two prints together. It circumnavigates the confines of the roll width of 180 centimeters. Needless to say, it requires an enormous amount of manual precision. In the early days, this was normally done along the white margin of a print. Today, two sheets are spliced along the center of the image. The technicians at Grieger noticed that the procedure is getting a bit trickier, actually, because the new generations of paper are getting thinner and thinner, so the tape is actually much more visible these days. I'm just gonna race through this because we've had a lot of discussion about the problems already, so the surfaces look great, but only as long as they're pristine. And we all know they're very easily tarnished. We were talking about the bad choices in packing materials, resulting in micro-operations in the surface. The other problem, those circular dots on the surface, this ghostly greeting from the work being covered in bubble wrap is a pretty brilliant example. They do inherently attract dust. We also discussed that, and cleaning is often necessary, but no matter how careful you are, you are leaving fine cleaning scratches. Here's what we have been using to remove loose dust particles from the surface of the works, the dust removal system that Clara was already talking about, so I'll race through this as well. And for sticky finger prints, water, ethanol, mix, 50-50, and a very fine microfiber cloth without a hard edge. Well, polishing, I haven't had much experience. I tried it on one artwork and I was quite satisfied with using the Grigo-recommended product here, the bonus paste, but it's still a terrifying procedure and you're taking off surface material, so beware. Because of all these headaches, I think Grigo now offers face mounting with scratch resistant PMMA, which has been available since about 2010. So it's worth noting that you have works by Thomas Deemond or Thomas Strudt that were produced post that date. They will definitely have this finish. It shows good resistance to cleaning scratches. However, when a deep scratch in a PMMA panel with SR coating has occurred, you cannot polish it away. The Kunststammlung owns three Jeff Wallite boxes and due to their popularity, they are on display probably more often than they should be. Consequently, we had to do a lot of maintenance and technical upgrading over the years, but as we have Alex among us, there's no need for me to go into this. Just to make the connection to Grigo, Jeff Wall also produces his face mounted works at Grigo's lab. Now in closing, I would like to touch on something slightly philosophical with the following case study. In this slide here, we're looking at an installation shot of one of the Kunststammlung's earliest photographic acquisitions. It's Thomas Strudt's Paradise Nine. The work was acquired one year after the artist made it. It's one of our largest photographs measuring 274 by 345 centimeters. You notice that the frame has a central bar running across the image. It is a manifestation of the artist bowing to technical constraints. In 1999, it was simply not technically possible to produce a work this big in one piece. The work is in fact consisting of two parts and the two panels are butt joined against each other in the center of the image. This was then covered up by the bar. A few years on, the artist and Grigo managed to create a new version of the work which no longer required the central bar. So Thomas Strudt approached the museum proposing to exchange the early version held by the Kunststammlung for the correct version which was now available. You guessed what happened, right? The old version of the work was de-installed and returned to the artist in exchange for this new version. And this is an image of Strudt explaining the installation of the new version to our team. Here we're looking at Paradise Nine and its new glory, no more central bar. It looks good, I have to admit, but it's a confusing case. What do we do when an artist says, look guys, there's a gap between the digital photograph as I envision it and current production technology, meaning that the machines or materials capable of matching my imagined dimensions of the work don't yet exist, but soon will. And then I'd like you to change it. Does it make the Kunststammlung's previous, does it mean the Kunststammlung previously had an interim state of the work? He has asked us to keep the addition number unchanged, by the way, in case you did wonder about that. And this is my future case study. The Kunststammlung is about to acquire Wolfgang Tillmann's Artist Room that was part of his exhibition at our museum in 2013. We all know that his work really pushed the boundaries of contemporary photography in the past 10 years and got the inkjet print on the map as a fine art medium. With Tillmann's inkjet prints, you buy certificates and the right to reproduce prints. Once the copies you have received at acquisition are no longer exhibitable. Today, his inkjet prints are produced in his studio in Berlin. There's a bit of ambiguity whether the replacements will also be produced at the studio. It seems feasible for now, but what about later on? And another question we have to discuss with the artist. How do we determine when to reprint the objects? Is it the artist who decides, or is it us? Reprinting is a really hot topic, I think. A recent symposium organized by the Dezett Bank Kunststammlung invited artists, conservators, collectors, curators, art historians, and fabricators to discuss reproduction and photographic art. The symposium was organized because the Dezett Bank had asked Gurski to reprint a work of his that had significantly faded. He agreed. However, he went on to rework the image. So they actually received a work that looked a lot different from the one they had acquired. Reprinting works that are in our collections, really? The museum person might feel rather uncomfortable about this, you would think. But in actual fact, artists are already authorizing the reprintings of their work today because their works have changed significantly usually due to continuous display or because structural problems that affect the work's aesthetic have occurred. We're really entering artwork authenticity territory. So if we have time, I'd love to hear your tales about this. And I would like to thank the organizers for getting me over here. Oh, I was trying to find an excuse to sneak this photo and saw this scene perfect. That's the young Gurski and the young Strudt looking out at us. Thank you to Jay and Sarah and also to the FAIC for making it possible that I could attend this conference.