Matthias Steinkraus

This is Berlin, too: the Kotti and the Rote Rose- a long-term study of Kreuzberg's underground scene.
Which social conditions and structures make an urban space visible? And how can this complexity be translated into photography? For his long-term study, Matthias Steinkraus (* 1981, Freiburg im Breisgau) spent six years, from 2010 to 2016, documenting the apartment block on the Kottbusser Tor, a large crossroads in Berlin, and the notorious 24-hour pub the Rote Rose, or "Red Rose." In Steinkraus's photographs the residents and the development of the New Kreuzberg Center are exemplary of how a long-established milieu and its idiosyncrasies are being pushed out of inner cities around the world. The artist captured his surroundings-the architecture, the faces, the texture of the city-clearly, up close, and mainly at night. Now, a selection of both digital and analog photographs are presented in Steinkraus's first monograph, Rote Rose-a distinctive artist's book, in which both form and content are specially attuned to each other.