Dirk Reinartz Photography
From December 19, 2025 to March 8, 2026, the Kunsthalle Rostock is presenting Dirk Reinartz's multi-award-winning photo series totenstill on the first floor of its museum building.
In 1971, he was the youngest reportage photographer for the news magazine Stern. He later worked for the art magazine art, the travel magazine Merian and ZEITmagazin, among others, and became a shooting star of German documentary photography. Throughout his life, he focused on Germany and the Germans. His reportages were never purely illustrative, but always developed an independent narrative level.
In the series totenstill, created between 1987 and 1993, Reinartz deals with the former National Socialist concentration camps. The photographs show the same infrastructures of mass extermination in stark black and white. Their gruesome purpose is inscribed in the facilities, as is the perfidious efficiency they were designed to achieve. Perhaps this is why the empty squares, walls and paths create such an eerie atmosphere. But perhaps also because their emptiness evokes the painfully absent - humanity itself and the people who were victimized here. There is no denying that the atmosphere is truly oppressive. The aura of black and white photography also contributes to this. It lends the images a timeless quality and raises the question of their current relevance.
In this way, the powerful images encourage more intense contemplation, pause and reflection. When you are alone with yourself and your own impressions, the pictures unfold their effect - silence begins to speak.
