The exhibition ‘Missing Pictures’ was organised in 2000 by Aktion Mensch e.V. in collaboration with the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. It was curated by Klaus Honnef and Gabriele Honnef-Harling.

The partipating photographers are:
Michael Bause, Evgen Bavcar, Sibylle Bergemann, Rasso Bruckert, Anton Corbijn, Josef H. Darchinger, Uwe Düttmann + Kai Zastrow, Hans Hansen, Gottfried Helnwein, Andreas Horlitz, Daniel Josefsohn, Nick Knight, Herlinde Koelbl, Olaf
Martens + Falk Schultze-Motel, Floris M. Neusüss, Andre Rival, Olaf Schlote, Marily Stroux and Wolfgang Zurborn.

It was a big challenge for me to approach the subject carefully, as my head is immediately filled with images that have shaped my consciousness. Most of these are appealing images that allow for little reaction other than concern. Looking beyond these clichéd images, I searched for situations in public life that do not typecast disabled people as victims, but show them as equal human beings. So I looked for places where people with disabilities actually meet, where they encounter others. I wasn’t looking for exceptional situations, but places of public life.

For me, the tension in a photograph dissipates when the subjects look at the camera and are aware of being photographed. So I wanted to remain in the background as an observer in order to capture situations that were as complex as possible. For me, an image must always retain a certain ambivalence and not be too clearly interpretable, so that the viewer is challenged to read the image and does not identify too quickly with what is depicted."

Text by Wolfgang Zurborn in the exhibition catalogue