Hans-Christian Schink went to Los Angeles in 2002 as a participant in a programme for German-American cultural exchange. He decided to photograph the city in two ways – with a view camera from high points on the edges of the city, and with a 35 mm camera, within the city. In both cases he worked in the middle of the night. The photos he made with the SLR he blew up and cropped down until all that remained were almost abstract, very grainy images. That LA no longer looks in any way like the clichéd image we all carry with us.

With his work Schink focuses particularly on the appearance of the no-man's-land in urban environments. For instance, making use of monumental formats he photographed the construction of viaducts in the former East Germany. In the work represented here he recorded walls, spatial elements which under normal circumstances escape our attention. Built to separate or close off, they are photographed by Schink to fill the whole image, through which they lose their depth and dimensions, as well as every reference to their function.