How light reveals: the exhibition "Foto: Hans Hansen" at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

This way of seeing benefits not only the public and the collectors of his independent works, but also the many companies that Hansen helped to gain new perspectives on their own products during his long career as a studio and advertising photographer – among them ERCO. At the MK&G, alongside the stairwell, the exhibition's creators made use of a symmetrical sequence of five rooms and their adjoining corridors on the first floor. The curators were Dr Esther Ruelfs, Head of the museum's Photography and New Media Collection, and Claire Müller, Justus Brinckmann fellow of the same collection. The exhibition design is by Prof. Axel Kufus, the graphic design by Heimann + Schwantes.

Prof. Maike Mia Höhne produced a film to accompany the exhibition – all, of course, in close coordination with the photographer himself.

When it came to illuminating the works, Hansen and the lighting designers Carsten Sander and Björn Salzer quickly agreed: here, really only technology from ERCO came into question. Naturally also because of the brand's close ties to his work, a connection addressed within the exhibition. Above all, however, it was down to the outstanding lighting quality and experience of the "light factory" when it comes to the effective, perception-oriented illumination of art and architecture.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum was able to acquire a suitable quantity of these lighting tools, which will pass into the museum's collection once the show has ended. To facilitate the most versatile use possible throughout the building, the spotlights are dimmed in the classic manual way, via a potentiometer on the housing. Robust, user-friendly technology of this kind for everyday exhibition work makes ERCO lighting tools a sound long-term investment for museums and exhibition venues of every kind. ERCO solutions such as suspended Hi-trac tracks and Parscan spotlights are also used, for example, in the museum's foyer, redesigned in 2024 by Studio Besau/Marguerre and Licht 01.

From the very outset, subjects such as glass and transparency, together with an extraordinarily knowledgeable handling of light, run through Hansen's work. In retrospect, then, it is hardly surprising that his path crossed with ERCO's at an early stage. During the 1970s, the brand had redefined itself as a "light factory", with the immaterial product of light, which is not itself visible but makes things visible. The mentor in this process was Otl Aicher, a brilliant designer and a nodal point in an ecosystem of designers, photographers, advertisers, and entrepreneurs — to which Hansen too belonged through his collaboration with brands such as Lufthansa and creatives such as Thomas Rempen. Who, if not Hansen, should be able to photograph an "invisible" product?

His photographs for the advertising campaigns that followed had a conceptual, at times almost didactic character: they conveyed the effects of light on bodies and light distributions in space in a highly aesthetic manner. Other motifs set out, in Hansen's characteristic manner, the organising principles of system products, or looked with apparent neutrality at the increasingly complex product design of the luminaires themselves. During this phase, Hansen was often the first "outsider" to set eyes on new products: what he saw in the products shaped how they were perceived within the company itself and — conveyed through advertising campaigns and media such as product catalogues or the corporate magazine "ERCO Lichtbericht" — in the markets.

The neutral, factual product images on the one hand and the staged, illustrative depictions on the other continue to exist side by side: "Images intended to spark interest with a high-key or low-key aesthetic — this is where we have learned a great deal from the classic Hansen motifs," says Hoffmann.