In another of his often-whimsical photographs, five girls of ground staff bunched on a bench\u2014Gary Winogrand style\u2014appear to have run out of conversation as they wait for the plane one of them seems intent to find in the sky. People at rest or in motion provide the thematic consistency in many of Mr. Mansholt\u2019s works. Moving sidewalks and escalators become a kind of metaphor for our need to keep going even in the midst of our all-too brief moments of respite and repose.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Werner Mansholt<\/p>\n
German contemporary photography swept across the globe this past decade leaving behind graduate school portfolios stacked to the rafters with muted, color field typologies. Even portraits were often objectified into anonymous, plot-less facades. But August Sander, from whom likely the whole cataloging idea emerged [along with botanist Karl Blossfeldt] was a storyteller. He allowed his fields of focus to invigorate our imaginations about the unspoken storylines surrounding his subjects. The titles were the typologies; the images belonged in family albums.<\/p>\n If a narrative impulse is on the ascendency in documentary photography, a group of photographers working in and around Frankfurt seem to have a corner on the trend. Joachim Hildebrand\u2019s earlier work celebrated the encyclopedic cataloguing of endless apartment dwellings in Hong Kong. These accordion-like vistas found a surprising counterpoint in a series of images of tropical fish in storefront tubs, packed like sardines swimming nowhere. The combined typologies, however, indicated no storylines as such.<\/p>\n \u00a9 Joachim Hildebrand<\/p>\n In his recent work, however, the narrative impulse steps in dramatically, turning up the volume on contemporary photography. Shooting down from shopping mall overpasses, without the graphic intent of the 30\u2019s Bauhaus masters such as Moholy-Nagy and Otto Steinert, Mr. Hildebrand catches streams of crisscrossing populations coming and going from who knows where to who knows where. In one close-up frame, he isolates two teenaged sisters perhaps, seated<\/em> on a rising escalator. We can tell the direction they are going by the inter-racial couple just above them. [His fingers on the small of her back is a stolen moment, the kind photographs of which there are millions that we, ourselves, never see!] What Mr. Hildebrand\u2019s slice of escalator image reveals, of course, is the length of the upward journey. Who sits on escalators to begin with? Certainly you wouldn\u2019t park your butt down like that for a short haul. A myriad of stories are built into the picture frame. Shopping without shopping bags gives the economic side, who has money? Below the teenagers a single guy checks out his cell phone, bringing in yet another human dimension. The visual cues are all at work: the dress of the younger sibling echoes the escalator stairs; the hand clicking the phone is not unlike the massage being sent to the small of the woman\u2019s back. The conversation, or lack thereof, among the sisters, grabs our attention most. Both siblings reflect on what the other may just have said. They are adrift in a sea of unknown anonymity. The volume, in this case, is the hum of the machinery moving them through this snippet of adolescence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 G\u00fcnter Stiegler<\/p>\n![\"Frankfurt](\"http:\/\/www.werner-mansholt.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/WernerMansholt_Frankfurt_Asche_-1012309-11.jpg\" "\\"WernerMansholt_Frankfurt_Asche_-1012309-1\\"")
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