Horst Janssen was not only a draughtsman, etcher and man of letters, but was also fascinated by photography throughout his life. Yet this fact is hardly known and the last exhibition on Janssen's photography was 20 years ago. Yet his diverse photographic oeuvre comprises around 3,000 photos, the majority of which lie unseen in archives in Hamburg and Oldenburg. With the exhibition "The Power of Photography", the photographer and current Horst Janssen Museum scholarship holder Oliver Godow now shows Horst Janssen as an enthusiastic photographic artist and, together with his co-curator Dr. Sabine Siebel, presents well-known but also completely unknown photographic works by Janssen.

The Horst Janssen Museum's collection includes numerous black-and-white photos from the 1970s, but also many colour Polaroids from the 1980s. They are supplemented in the exhibition by loans from the Galerie St. Gertrude and photo repros from the Kunsthalle Hamburg. In addition, thanks to the commitment of co-curator Sabine Siebel, the exciting photographic estate of Janssen's friend, the Hamburg photographer Volker Eckhoff, could be included for the first time. With expert knowledge, but also with a subjective view, artist-photographer Oliver Godow has curated an exhibition from it that shows how complex and highly emotional Janssen's photographic oeuvre is and what a contemporary approach it follows from today's perspective. As Godow says: "Completely RETRO and yet NOW."

With the kind support of the LzO Foundation for Art and Culture.