Torsten Warmuth sets out in search of the unmistakable face of the world's metropolises. Previously, this was in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Paris or New York, and now in Africa's biggest city: Cairo. It is urban life beyond the tourist destinations that shapes the face of a city. In Cairo, a metropolis of twenty million, Torsten Warmuth found this in the bazaars of Khan-el-Khalilil, the traffic-filled street of Talaat Harb in the traditional commercial and banking district, and in the cavas (coffee houses) on Midan Sayeda-Aisha, not far from the "city of the dead", Imam Al-Shafi'i. Torsten Warmuth employs a large-format camera to visually isolate fractions of a second. With rigorous precision, the artist exercises, seeks and composes - like an alchemist - light and shade; in "It's a Man's World", he stalls the movement of passers-by as they push "Against the Flow" in the same way as he halts the busy taxi drivers from downtown Cairo. The very things that these strangers keep from us are disclosed in the intentional blurring; their destinations, their secrets, their breath. Torsten Warmuth exposes them and makes them accessible to us, but still maintains a distance. We long for their facial contours, but the photographer denies them to us consistently. He dismisses us with magic - there is no pointing finger, nothing didactic. An exposure time that persists into the unrecognisable means that the pictorial subject - almost always the human figure in his work - remains little more than imagined, glimpsed, sensed.

Perhaps his refusal to provide clarity reminds us that we only see in others what we understand; what we want, what we believe we can see, or what we can tolerate. Everything is in a state of uninterrupted motion around us - and our longing for quiet goes unsatisfied. Inevitably, the viewer recognises himself in these beings as they cautiously feel their way through the world. Every single one of us is one of these flitting figures. No-one will ever hold onto us - any more than we can grasp the young boy pushing his cart through the hurly-burly of Cairo. Adept as he may be at finding his way through life, he remains vulnerable and no-one can pin him down. By means of his slow-motion photography, Torsten Warmuth pinpoints our futile desire to cling to things.