Jürgen Scriba Field service

14.06.–08.09.2024 at Neuen Galerie im Höhmannhaus

Through the vagaries of fate, physicist Jürgen Scriba became a photographer. A short-term consultancy job at an organ building company turned into several years of interim management and finally into a company for organ electronics. The disappointment of having put the camera down for longer than planned became the inspiration for the "Field Service" photography project.

Around six years ago, Scriba permanently mounted a camera in his car for this purpose. This allows him to take photos when he is not actually travelling as a photographer, but on "field service". Since now he has pressed the shutter button over 80,000 times. The image sensor attached to the car captures what is out there. And yet the images show the photographer's highly subjective perceptions - surreal scenes that the driver's brain normally blocks out in a kind of autopilot mode: Unexpectedly beautiful landscapes, quasi-official recorded cityscapes and irritating traces of human life.

For his "Road Photography", Scriba catalogued his photographic finds in the style of an imaginary authority in 15 categories, such as "Main roads", "Closed towns" or "Maintenance and service areas". The views of German landscape and settlement design appear in social media with characterising descriptions such as "A financial services provider's brute architectural profiling attempt." This sometimes leads to surprisingly humour-free discussions among the online audience.

You are cordially invited to the opening on Thursday, 13 June 2024 at 7 pm in the Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus!