"Straße in Oberhausen, Ruhrgebiet"

gelatin silver print

titled, dated, numbered, signed by gallery owner (pencil), gallery-stamp on verso

The photograph is one of around 100 pictures from the series "Ruhrgebietslandschaften", which Albert Renger-Patzsch produced from 1927 to 1935 as the only free series of pictures not tied to a commission. Renger-Patzsch took pictures of suburban and slag heap landscapes, backyards and suburban houses, industrial and colliery sites. He shows no sights, no monuments and no natural idyll. His Ruhr region is deserted, but populated by a fixed inventory of material motifs: roads, railroads and paths, lanterns and electricity pylons, fences and grids, fallow land and fields, slag heaps and garbage dumps, miners' houses and tenements, chimneys and winding towers, trees and gardens, carpenter's huts and half-timbered houses. Much of it seems to stand in contrast to one another. In Renger-Patzsch's photographs, however, they grow together in equal measure. With their restrained emotionality and compositional clarity, the photographs mark an important position in modernist depictions of industry and landscape.
(Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, translated with DeepL.com)