A lot of things that characterized the image of the Luxembourg district of Kirchberg even just few decades ago are part of history today. No phrase is as true, and simultaneously as hackneyed, as the statement: “The Kirchberg Plateau is changing.” But how is this change manifesting itself, even while it is still in full flow? The casual observer will be struck, above all, by the building sites, cranes and road closures. But if you look more closely and – like the photographer does, with his professional eye – focus on the apparently incidental, you will see exciting fractures, transitions and gaps that point to the future and simultaneously represent residual traces of earlier urban planning.

The Luxembourg photographer Marc Theis, who lives in Hanover, has explored the Kirchberg Plateau with the fresh eye of the visitor, and captured moments in time that will only fit into a (possibly complete) overall picture in several decades’ time For over 15 years, the Kirchberg Fund has regularly given commissions to selected representatives of contemporary photography to record progress in urban redevelopment and, each time, to reveal new and different perspectives on the Kirchberg.

Through this collaboration with recognized photo-artists, the Fund is not only fulfilling its duty to document what is happening, but is also contributing to the iconographic heritage of Luxembourg.

A first-time exhibition partner to the Fund, the Luxembourg National Library has extended the horizons of the photo series, including through the idea of giving the photographs a poetic “depth of focus” by inviting Luxembourg poets to write poems to accompany the images.

About the photographer

Marc Theis studied commercial art at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and graphic design at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts. After five years in the advertising department and as head of the photo archive at the travel agency TUI, in 1983 Theis established himself as a freelance photographer.

He started creating his photo-documentations in 1984; these include his early work De Schwaarze Wee, about his home town of Dudelange and, in 2005, his series Lost in time on the abandoned halls of the Continental tyre factories in Hanover. He has now realized over 20 of these photo series and has won several international and national prizes, including the gold medal in the 1985 “Nikon Contest” in Japan for best colour photo.