DÜREN.- A major retrospective dedicated to German photographer Wilhelm Schürmann has opened at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, offering visitors an intimate look at the places, streets, and communities that have shaped the artist’s life and work over the past five decades.

Titled “Wilhelm Schürmann. Neighbors,” the exhibition runs from March 1 through May 24, 2026, and brings together early photographs alongside more recent images, tracing how Schürmann’s artistic vision has evolved while remaining rooted in the everyday environments around him.

A photographer of familiar places

Born in Dortmund in 1946, Schürmann has long been fascinated by the ordinary landscapes of daily life—streets, buildings, and the people who inhabit them. Rather than searching for dramatic subjects, he turns his camera toward the places he knows best: the neighborhoods where he has lived, walked, and observed life unfold.

The exhibition highlights this personal approach by juxtaposing early work from the late 1970s and early 1980s with photographs taken more recently near his homes in Berlin and Kohlscheid, a town near Aachen close to the Dutch border.

At the center of the show is “Steinhammerstraße,” a landmark series produced between 1979 and 1981. The photographs document the street in Lütgendortmund where Schürmann grew up, capturing façades, backyards, storefronts, and residents with quiet attentiveness.

These images reveal a deep familiarity with the neighborhood. The camera lingers on everyday details—wallpaper patterns, signage, clothing, and street textures—turning the ordinary into a subtle visual narrative about community and memory.

Between documentary and artistic observation

Although Schürmann’s photographs often feel documentary in nature, they are carefully composed works shaped by the history of modern photography. His images echo the influence of figures such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, André Kertész, and Walker Evans, while also reflecting the traditions of European and American street photography.

In many photographs, traces of popular culture—postcards, advertisements, decorative interiors, or fashion—appear within the frame, creating layered images that reveal the visual atmosphere of a particular time.

Early black-and-white photographs included in the exhibition show Schürmann wandering through Cologne during its post-war reconstruction and along the Belgian border region, documenting landscapes and urban spaces undergoing transformation. These works already reveal the compositional discipline that defines his practice: careful framing, attention to spatial relationships, and a sensitivity to the quiet stories embedded in everyday scenes.

Expanding the practice in the digital era

The arrival of digital photography significantly broadened Schürmann’s working method. Instead of producing isolated series, he now photographs continuously, developing multiple themes simultaneously.

Much of this recent work focuses on the contrasting environments of his two homes. In Kohlscheid, the landscape bears the marks of former coal mining industries. Fields, infrastructure, and remnants of wartime defenses—including bunkers and tank barriers from the historic Westwall—appear partially reclaimed by nature.

Schürmann photographs these landscapes with an analytical eye, observing how human activity has reshaped the terrain over time.

In Berlin, however, the focus shifts to the density and dynamism of the modern city. Intersections, construction sites, apartment blocks, and panoramic city views fill the frame. In some images, the city appears almost organic—an urban environment expanding and mutating like an untamed ecosystem.

Cities, landscapes, and social change

Taken together, the photographs presented in “Neighbors” form a visual reflection on the historical and social transformations of the places Schürmann has known.

Dortmund and Kohlscheid, both shaped by industrial development and economic restructuring, reveal the lasting impact of mining and post-war change on the German landscape. Berlin, by contrast, represents a city in constant motion, transformed by the rapid architectural and cultural shifts that have followed German reunification.

Through these images, Schürmann explores a larger question: how neighborhoods—whether rural or urban—function as living environments where social life unfolds.

A quiet but powerful body of work

Rather than presenting grand historical events, Schürmann’s photography focuses on small, often overlooked moments. His images invite viewers to slow down and look closely at the spaces people inhabit every day.

The exhibition ultimately suggests that the idea of “neighborhood” is not only geographical but emotional—a network of places tied together by memory, observation, and lived experience.

By returning again and again to the environments around him, Wilhelm Schürmann has built a body of work that quietly captures the changing face of contemporary Europe.

“Wilhelm Schürmann. Neighbors” is now on view at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren through May 24, 2026.