"Die Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten"

In his first exhibition with us Bernhard Timmermann (* 1966) presents "The
Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other”, a series of large-format digital
photographs in which he overlaps moments from documentaries, urban
landscapes and staged pictures of people, and turns this new fusion into an
unusual and impressively precise scene. Timmermann’s montages reveal the
actions that took place during one hour at a specific place, inspired among
other things by Peter Handke’s play of the same name.

In selected places, apparently in an urban area, Bernhard Timmermann
photographs people in their daily life: coming home from work, going
shopping, waiting for the bus, playing football, standing around. People who
never actually met then meet each other in the resulting photos. They had
all "been” in the same place (the classic photographic evidence), but not at
the same time, just within the same hour.
The individuals who had appeared at this time in the chosen place are
individually photographed by Timmermann with a stationary camera after which
he uses his chance "extras” as the characters in his arranged story. The
artist places particular characters at will in a new, time-lapsed
hyper-reality: he leaves others out and composes dense, almost enclosed
situations as well as open, almost void scenes. The photographer acts as a
director, the stage is clearly defined, the gaze is rigid and the only
dynamic occurs through the temporally forced interaction of people, who in
reality might even avoid each other. The topical theme of migration is
present anyway in Timmermann’s view of German cities.

With his method Bernhard Timmermann develops a conceptually clearly defined
field within the possibilities of digital photography and shows through his
technical perfection not only the options open to this relatively new
technique, but also within an art-historical and theoretical context gives
impetus to a modern approach to the reality at hand. Perfection is not on
show here, instead it is in its best sense an effectively utilized tool,
although this only becomes gradually apparent. For example on the football
pitch when some players are still playing, another area is already being
cleaned and a child is practicing with a ball. Less clearly defined motifs
can only be recognized as digital montages through small details, e.g. the
legs of two of the characters. Other images do not attempt to conceal, they
are clearly composed, but very "real” in the traditional, analogue sense of
a snapshot…