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

This way of seeing benefits not only the public and the collectors of his independent work, but also the many companies that Hansen, over his long career as a studio and advertising photographer, helped to gain new perspectives on their own products — ERCO among them. At the MK&G, alongside the stairwell, the exhibition makers made use of a symmetrical sequence of five rooms along with the adjoining corridors on the second floor. It was curated by Dr. Esther Ruelfs, head of the museum's Photography and New Media collection, and Claire Müller, Justus Brinckmann fellow in the same collection. The exhibition design comes from Prof. Axel Kufus, the graphic design from Heimann + Schwantes.

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

When it came to illuminating the works, Hansen and lighting designers Carsten Sander and Björn Salzer were quickly in agreement: realistically, only technology from ERCO was an option here. Of course, this was partly due to the brand's close ties to his work, which the exhibition itself addresses. Above all, though, it was because of 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 matching set of these lighting tools, which will pass into the museum's holdings once the show has ended. To facilitate the most universal use possible throughout the building, the spotlights are dimmed in the classic manual way, via a potentiometer on the housing. Technology of this kind—robust and easy to operate for the everyday demands of exhibition work—makes ERCO lighting tools a secure long-term investment for museums and exhibition venues of all kinds. The museum's foyer, redesigned in 2024 by Studio Besau/Marguerre and Licht 01, is another example, featuring ERCO solutions such as suspended Hi-trac tracks and Parscan spotlights.

From the very beginning, subjects such as glass and transparency and an extraordinarily knowledgeable handling of light have run through Hansen's work. In retrospect, it therefore comes as little surprise 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 nexus within an ecosystem of designers, photographers, advertisers, and entrepreneurs that also included Hansen, through his collaboration with brands such as Lufthansa and with creatives such as Thomas Rempen. Who, if not Hansen, should be capable of photographing 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 objects and light distributions in space in a highly aesthetic manner. Other motifs set out the ordering principles of system products in Hansen's characteristic manner, 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 lay 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 catalogs and the corporate magazine "ERCO Lichtbericht"—in the markets.

As before, the neutral, matter-of-fact product images on the one hand and the staged, illustrative depictions on the other exist side by side: "Images intended to spark interest through a high-key or low-key aesthetic—here we learned a great deal from the classic Hansen motifs," says Hoffmann.