In Berlin, an exhibition at the C/O Berlin cultural center examines our obsession with images

This publication is also available in:

Escaping the scorching heat currently affecting France, yes, but where to go? Look no further. Head to Berlin and its slightly milder climate (aside from a few days of extreme heat, we won’t lie to you).

To celebrate the summer season, the Museum of Photography and Visual Arts, C/O Berlin, presents two decidedly modern exhibitions that are entertaining and provoke thought about our times.

The first, 16° Fische, offers the German artist Walter Schels a wonderful gift for his 90th birthday: a first retrospective of his seven decades of photography.

The second, The Lure of the Image, explores our relationship with images in the digital age. Over 2.1 trillion images were produced last year. Why do it? Why do we feel the need to document everything?

The exhibition features fourteen artists, with a majority being young women, who blend sociology, semiotics, and the symbolism of images to question our relationship with them.

A surprising and gentle exhibition, perfect for kicking off the summer.

The Retrospective of German Photographer Walter Schels 16° Fische

Raw yet never brutal, realistic and poetic, Walter Schels’ work, who still operates from his Hamburg studio with his wife and artistic partner Beate Lakotta, is complex, evolving, and deeply poetic.

The journey begins in 1970s New York and ends with documentary portraits around gender, featuring individuals who transitioned in the 2010s-2020s. With this deeply touching series, the artist aimed to make visible the difficult process of becoming visible oneself.

Another series of portraits represents blind individuals. And while the photos are intriguing, Walter’s perspective on his subjects is equally compelling. The experience was transformative for the artist, who recounts being surprised when the blind individuals he photographed asked to see the exhibition. He then invited the group to visit, describing their portraits to them.

The exhibition concludes with portraits of newborns, the Dalai Lama, as well as photographs of dried flowers and a series of animal portraits where the beauty and raw, unfiltered emotions of the animals are captured.

Walter asserts that he will always prefer a photo that evokes fear to a boring one, and his work, always in search of understanding the person he is about to photograph, clearly confirms this.

The Lure Of The Image: Why Are We Obsessed with Images in the Digital Age?

How are our opinions influenced by images in our digital society, and what role do they play in shaping our social, cultural, and political viewpoints?

This is the vast and highly relevant subject of this project. Four of the fourteen artists were present to showcase their artistic works in the form of videos, collages, and photographs.

Art questions issues of our time: why do we feel the need to document everything? What does scrolling say about our era? The emergence of masculinism in the online sphere, or what our profiles on dating apps conceal.

The online subculture is teeming with profoundly human questions that, apart from being markers of our time, are sociologically very significant.

A corner of the exhibition is dedicated to ASMR, a technique that creates specific sensory stimuli that are pleasant to hear. One artist has gathered videos of colorful ASMR sponges. The overall effect is visually lovely and pop, but the sounds, initially pleasant, gradually become overwhelming and disturbing, much like the overwhelming amount of content we have access to.

The exhibitions will be presented until September 2, 2026, at C/O Berlin, Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin.

Image credit: ©Dina Kelberman The Wave C/O Berlin Amerika Haus