Cities Unknown von HG Esch

Henn Galerie in Munich presents HG Esch's photographs of "Unknown Cities" in China

At the opening on June 21, 2012, at 7 PM, Andreas Kaufmann (Leica Camera AG), Stefan Lübbe (Bastei Lübbe Verlag), and Ulf Meyer (architecture journalist) will speak. Welcome address by Gunter Henn (Henn Architekten). The photographer HG Esch will be present.

The 21st century is being referred to as the "urban" and "Pacific" century. In East Asia, mega-cities are emerging at a breakneck pace, unlike anything humanity has ever seen: they grow rapidly and without a clear concept, housing two billion people. They are called Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Wuhan, or Chengdu, and in the West, few could even locate them on a map. Today, East Asia has three times as many city dwellers as the entire Western world combined. Their dynamism, their insatiable hunger for space and energy, their youthfulness, and their ugliness make them both repulsive and fascinating subjects for architects, planners, and journalists from the West. The new "Mega-Cities without Names" owe their existence to explosive economic growth.

HG Esch has titled his photo series "Cities Unknown." It depicts these cities as they are: faceless, shrouded in smog, lacking identity, radically heterogeneous, self-similar to the point of unrecognizability, and freshly planted in the landscape. Esch's perspective is unique and unsettling. Here, one can witness the new metropolises as they grow.

Hans Georg Esch works as a freelance architectural photographer for national and international architecture firms and is now considered one of the most renowned representatives of his field. His series "Megacities" and "City and Structure" gained him recognition. Esch lives and works in Hennef/Stadt Blankenberg.

Publication for the exhibition: CITIES UNKNOWN, 186 pages with texts by Klaus Honnef, Eckard Ribbeck, and Raymund Scheffler, Quadriga Verlag, Berlin

Text: Ulf Meyer