In his first exhibition with us Bernhard Timmermann (* 1966) presents "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other”, a series of large-format digital photographs in which he overlaps moments from documentaries, urban landscapes and staged pictures of people, and turns this new fusion into an unusual and impressively precise scene. Timmermann’s montages reveal the actions that took place during one hour at a specific place, inspired among other things by Peter Handke’s play of the same name. In selected places, apparently in an urban area, Bernhard Timmermann photographs people in their daily life: coming home from work, going shopping, waiting for the bus, playing football, standing around. People who never actually met then meet each other in the resulting photos. They had all "been” in the same place (the classic photographic evidence), but not at the same time, just within the same hour. The individuals who had appeared at this time in the chosen place are individually photographed by Timmermann with a stationary camera after which he uses his chance "extras” as the characters in his arranged story. The artist places particular characters at will in a new, time-lapsed hyper-reality: he leaves others out and composes dense, almost enclosed situations as well as open, almost void scenes. The photographer acts as a director, the stage is clearly defined, the gaze is rigid and the only dynamic occurs through the temporally forced interaction of people, who in reality might even avoid each other. The topical theme of migration is present anyway in Timmermann’s view of German cities. With his method Bernhard Timmermann develops a conceptually clearly defined field within the possibilities of digital photography and shows through his technical perfection not only the options open to this relatively new technique, but also within an art-historical and theoretical context gives impetus to a modern approach to the reality at hand. Perfection is not on show here, instead it is in its best sense an effectively utilized tool, although this only becomes gradually apparent. For example on the football pitch when some players are still playing, another area is already being cleaned and a child is practicing with a ball. Less clearly defined motifs can only be recognized as digital montages through small details, e.g. the legs of two of the characters. Other images do not attempt to conceal, they are clearly composed, but very "real” in the traditional, analogue sense of a snapshot…