Matthias Steinkraus: Rote Rose

Summary

Which social conditions and structures make an urban space visible? And how can this complexity be translated into photography?For his long-term study, Matthias Steinkraus (b. 1981, Freiburg im Breisgau) spent six years, from 2010 to 2016, documenting the apartment block on the Kottbusser Tor, a large crossroads in Berlin, and the legendary 24-hour pub Rote Rose, or red rose. In Steinkraus's photographs the residents and the development of the New Kreuzberg Center-a huge block of 367 apartments on twelve floors-are exemplary of how a long-established milieu and its idiosyncrasies are being pushed out of inner cities around the world. The artist captured his surroundings-the architecture, the faces, the texture of the city-clearly, up close, and mainly at night. Now, a selection of both digital and analog photographs are presented in Steinkraus's first monograph, Rote Rose-a distinctive artist's book, in which both form and content are specially attuned to each other.