Matthias Steinkraus

Which social conditions and structures make an urban space visible? And how can this complexity be translated into photography? For his long-term study, Matthias Steinkraus (b. 1981, Freiburg im Breisgau) spent six years, from 2010 to 2016, documenting the apartment block on the Kottbusser Tor, a large crossroads in Berlin, and the legendary 24-hour pub Rote Rose , or “red rose.” In Steinkraus’s photographs the residents and the development of the New Kreuzberg Center—a huge block of 367 apartments on twelve floors—are exemplary of how a long-established milieu and its idiosyncrasies are being pushed out of inner cities around the world. The artist captured his surroundings—the architecture, the faces, the texture of the city—clearly, up close, and mainly at night. Now, a selection of both digital and analog photographs are presented in Steinkraus‘s first monograph, Rote Rose—a distinctive artist’s book, in which both form and content are specially attuned to each other.