HAMBURG.- With the exhibition “Photo: Hans Hansen”, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) is devoting a large-scale retrospective to one of the leading photographers in post-war Germany. From 17 April to 1 November 2026, viewers will be able to discover around 220 iconic photographs from a career spanning over six decades. In international ad campaigns for companies including Lufthansa, Nikon, Volkswagen and Erco, Hans Hansen revolutionised product photography in the 1960s and shaped the collective visual memory of entire generations. Examples from these campaigns are supplemented in the show with works demonstrating Hansen’s close collaboration with designers such as Tapio Wirkkala. Tools, correspondence, sketches, archival material and selected objects from Hansen’s own private collection are also on view to provide deeper insights into his working process. The photographer applies his distinctive minimalist, objective visual language to exploring his chosen means of photographic expression in his most recent series of works, “Analog” (2024), and he is also producing a new photo series especially for the exhibition.

While the world outside the photographer’s studio undergoes constant change, inside, an unvarying order prevails: A place for everything and everything in its place. In his still lifes, Hans Hansen reduces objects to their essence, arranging, breaking down and structuring their shapes, colours and materials. His photographs exude a timeless air. One of the best-known examples is the image of a Volkswagen Golf (1988) that has been dismantled into some 7,000 individual parts.

Hansen’s works bear an unmistakable signature, focusing the gaze with radical clarity on the everyday world of things and design – while at the same time the photographer continually searches for new pictorial solutions. Light and shadow, composition and perspective are the central parameters and elementary means by which he constantly calls into question the very nature of photography.

Dr. Carsten Brosda, Hamburg Senator for Culture and Media: “Hans Hansen weds Hanseatic modesty with absolute world-class quality. As one of Germany’s most influential photographers, he manages to transform everyday objects into images of stark beauty. This exhibition has been made possible by Hansen’s decision to entrust the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe with the legacy of his life’s work, the culmination of years of productive collaboration and the trust placed in the Photography and New Media Collection.”

Tulga Beyerle, Director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg: “With his lucid, finely composed photographs, Hans Hansen has changed the way we look at things. Though they may seem incidental, every glint of light, every shadow is precisely placed and serves to enhance our perception of the objects depicted, which often remain enigmatic. The exhibition pays tribute to a photographer who has long been closely associated with our institution and whose visual language has been seminal while the authorship behind it has largely remained in the background. We are delighted to now present this outstanding body of work to viewers as part of our collection.”

EXHIBITION THEMES

The exhibition traces the development of Hans Hansen’s work by way of groups of images and creative phases arranged according to specific themes.

On the ground floor of the historic staircase, visitors are invited to make interactive self-portraits in a photo booth. Hansen then presents in the rotunda a new series of large-format photos of glass objects from his private collection (2025), which he stacks and combines into sculptural arrangements.

At the centre of the show is Hansen’s studio and his personality as a photographer. A prologue shows his earliest photographs from 1956 to 1969, while his most recent project, “Analog” (published by Spector Books), is being exhibited here for the first time.

Here, the photographer focuses his lens on the things that have surrounded him in his studio for decades: cameras, lamps, tools. He has staged these items in precisely lit photographs as silent assistants to his work. “Analog” is both a look back in time and a contemplation – as well as a plea for the appreciation of the material quality of photography in the digital age.

Visitors can experience the atmosphere in Hansen’s studio in an installation comprising photographic backdrops, a bench and camera equipment. This setting also serves as the stage for a film portrait introducing the photographer and his working methods.

Between 1963 and 1967, Hans Hansen worked with art director Jack Piccolo from the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) on the worldwide campaign for Lufthansa. Shot with a 35mm camera, the photos drew on the aesthetics of photojournalism to condense situational, emotionally charged motifs into images that arouse the desire to travel. Panoramic landscapes, famous sights and shots of animals in the wild are combined with Otl Aicher’s reserved typography. In the show, these commissioned works are shown alongside Hansen’s independent photos of weathered posters with fragments of typography, taken in places including Spain, China and Iran – an homage to the poetry of everyday life.

In the late 1960s, Hansen began working for Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Fiat. His car photographs are a prime example of the enormous efforts involved in analogue image production in the pre-digital age: from the spectacular staging of a Fiat flying from one roof of the Fiat factories to another, driven by stuntman Rémy Julienne, to the Mercedes SL-Class posed before backgrounds with colourful gradients. Such works illustrate Hansen’s perfectionist craftsmanship and his aspiration to develop a fitting and effective pictorial solution for every motif.

Accompanying these images in the show is a dense selection of 35mm photographs Hansen shot in US production facilities and on the side of a highway. These scenes lay bare the realities of industrial production and everyday culture – for example, a car totalled in an accident – as a counterpoint to the hyper-precision of product photography and an ominous foreshadowing of the rise and fall of automotive production, the repercussions of which are being felt today.

In the 1970s, Hansen began developing a new visual language for food photography for clients including Stern magazine, the Rewe supermarket chain and Lufthansa: from the ultra-enlarged surface of a strawberry to the serial depiction of avocados and a nearly unrecognisable rhubarb stalk. The careful teasing out of form and materiality results here in minimalist, timeless images. These photos are for the most part commissioned works planned by editorial departments, accompanied by advertising texts and integrated with graphics. The exhibition underscores this context by providing an extensive look at Hansen’s archive of printing proofs for Stern,

The chapter Glass, Ice and Water traces how Hansen’s collaboration with the prominent Finnish glass designer Tapio Wirkkala starting in 1962 marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for the material of glass. In his photographs, glass objects take on the appearance of melting glaciers, reflective water surface or textured landscape formations. Hansen not only discovered for himself the photographic potential of light and glass but also a fascination for how photography can bring out the look and physical qualities of materials. This enthusiasm forms a leitmotif running through his entire oeuvre. In the exhibition, Hansen’s photographs are shown alongside objects from his glass collection, which the museum acquired in 2023.

Another chapter is dedicated to the conceptual aspects of Hans Hansen’s photography. How far can a photographer dare to push the reduction and abstraction of an image when it is intended for a magazine editorial or product campaign? A photo-spread published in Greenpeace Magazin in 1999 for the feature “Trauma” shows how consistently Hansen adopts a conceptual viewpoint and applies pictorial reduction in socio-political contexts.

Hansen has been working with Thomas Rempen (Hildmann, Simon, Rempen & Schmitz) since the 1980s on shaping the brand image of the lighting manufacturer Erco based on similarly minimalistic images. The collaboration came about on the recommendation of Otl Aicher, who piloted a rebranding of the company starting in 1974. In rigorously composed series, Hansen photographs stereometric volumes, illuminating each in a different way. The result is a study of three variations of the same motif that illustrates how changing lighting effects can make the structure of an object look completely different. The formal simplicity of these images belies the elaborate technique that went into making them.

The same gallery also demonstrates how Hansen never made a strict distinction between his independent and commissioned works, devoting to both the same painstaking attention. His primary aim is to create simple yet powerful pictures.