In 2026, photography looks back on two hundred years. Around 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in permanently capturing the view from his study in Le Gras on a pewter plate. It is the oldest surviving photograph. Since then, the medium has carried a promise that was also a burden: to show the world as it is. That the photographic image is never merely a mirror but always also a construction is one of the most productive insights in art since the mid-20th century. The exhibition »Jenseits des Abbilds« follows this insight and spans an arc from the Subjektive Fotografie of the postwar period to contemporary artistic positions.
Its starting point lies 75 years back. In 1951, the Saarbrücken physician and photographer Otto Steinert showed the exhibition »subjektive fotografie« at the State School for Arts and Crafts. It quickly attracted international attention and gave photography in postwar Germany a new direction. Steinert drew on the experiments of the avant-garde of the 1920s, on Bauhaus and Neues Sehen.