The 30 images, some large-format, avail themselves of a legacy long lost until Erik Niedling rediscovered it: an archive of thousands of glass negatives from the period between the two world wars. If they were produced for order catalogues of the well established Erfurter nursery Kakteen-Haage or if the owner, the globetrotter and botanic scholar, Walther Haage felt challenged by Albert Renger-Patzsch, can no longer be determined.

The images show plants, blossoms, tools and the everyday life of garden production. Their sober visual language clearly allude to Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, who at the same time established the New Objectivity as a groundbreaking, new style of photography.

Erik Niedling forgoes directly manipulating the material and subjects it instead to an elaborate reviewing process. The results are, nevertheless, totally new images, that differ from the originals in a paradoxical manner thus, that they end up reproducing the originals. The photographic carrier of information ­ the negative itself - becomes the object in Erik Niedling's new work.

"Erik Niedling succeeds in creating something wonderful and at the same time highly alienating: he forces the aesthetic-epistemological programme out of the New Objectivity photographs and leaves them in an idiosyncratic twilight ­ in the hauntingly beautiful and darkly luminous light of photography. And in this light, our cultural history begins to shine anew." (Bernd Stiegler)

Erik Niedling lives and works in Berlin. A catalogue with texts from Ingo Niermann und Bernd Stiegler (Schaden-Verlag) and accompanying his new work, FORMATION will be available.