A copy always presupposes an original. What does it mean when Daniel Poller titles his series of works Frankfurter Kopien (Frankfurt Copies) and yet – unusually enough for the medium of photography – it is made up of unique copies? How can this twist be resolved and made productive for an understanding of the work? Knowing the context of this work is one way of confronting the contradiction. The other possibility is to look at the formal-aesthetic settings.

First of all, the context: it is named through the major urban development project carried out by the city of Frankfurt between 2012 and 2018, as part of which the Dom-Römer-District, which was destroyed in World War II, was rebuilt with faithful replicas. The brutalist post-war architecture that stood on this site (das Technische Rathaus; the Technical Town Hall) was demolished in order to fill the 7,000 square meter area in Frankfurt’s old town with buildings mainly in the medieval and Renaissance styles. The completed reconstruction of the historic buildings stands for a restorative and neoliberal building culture, which not only goes hand in hand with a policy of displacement, but also with an ignorance of established structures in the urban space and the contingency of their history. The questionability of this urban planning approach becomes clear with Daniel Poller’s eye for detail.

The artist decided to point his large-format camera at the round about 60 spolia, photograph them systematically and begin by researching their sources. Spolia are the surviving original structural elements of the buildings destroyed in the war, which were reassembled from their scattered storage locations and integrated into the new buildings during the reconstruction process. The inclusion of these historical components was intended to convey or reinforce an impression of originality. However, Poller’s study of the sources – his “reconstruction work”, so to speak – makes it clear that this claim could not be upheld or fully realized, as the spolia were by no means installed in their original locations and their provenances could not always be clarified. Rather, the impression prevails that the allocation was partly arbitrary and thus represents a kind of “interpretation of the past”4 (Philipp Oswalt).
Added to this is Daniel Poller’s critical examination of the “Farbleitplan” (color plan), an annex to the design statutes of the Neue Altstadt (New Historic District), which stipulated the binding use of all color values in the course of the reconstruction. The architectural theorist Philipp Oswalt has already critically described the entire ensemble of the New Old Town – among many other aspects – as a new form of “media architecture”5, as its design was generated solely from technical (i.e. photographic) images and found its point of reference here in particular. The city of Frankfurt thus decided against a design process that would productively feed the specific needs of the time into urban planning concepts. And if, despite an almost “photorealistic reconstruction”6 of Frankfurt’s old town, the spolia could not always be installed in their original locations, it must also be conceded with regard to the development of the color master plan that this was similarly speculative due to the precarious source situation.

4 Philipp Oswalt, „Neue Altstadt Frankfurt. Restaurative Shizophrenie„“, in: Ders., Bauen am Nationalen Haus. Architektur als Identitätspolitik, S. 147-157.

5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.
Galerie Tobias Naehring

How does Daniel Poller bring together these two detailed aspects, which he has extracted from the overall ensemble of the Neue Altstadt and worked on artistically in his work? How does he encounter them formally and aesthetically? And how does he arrive at a critical commentary on this questionable project of a Frankfurt copy? The title of the work as a copy is the first logical conceptual decision to emphasize the character of the replica of the Dom-Römer-Areal. Instead – counterfactually to the copy, so to speak – to provide originals, i.e. non-reproducible photographic works, describes the second conceptual decision. The artist decided to literally “intervene” in the photographic reproductions of the previously photographed spolia. Initially, this was done by repeatedly overprinting the photographs with the corresponding colors of the color guide. At the same time, he held and pulled the paper during the printing process. This resulted in manual distortions of the original image. Instead of illustrating something “old” by reproducing it, he intervened performatively in the printing process and worked aggressively with the resulting scratches, stains and cuts. The result is unique pieces of great aesthetic appeal which, contrary to the reproducible character of photography, are not only no longer reproducible in the way they appear, but also represent a critical commentary on a building culture based on questionable strategies of appropriation of historical material. By overprinting the motifs of the spolia several times and in series, i.e. by overprinting images of the spolia in different color variations, Daniel Poller refers to the spectrum of their possible provenances and also creates a color space of good contrasts. Last but not least, the artist allows the pictures – the unique pieces – to become objects with all these approaches, which are substantiated on the one hand and aesthetically convincing on the other, thus highlighting their original character and emphasizing the materiality of the photographic. This is a good response to an urban planning approach that, with its approach to the reconstruction of the New Old Town, succumbed not least to the illusions of photography.

Maren Lübbke-Tidow, 2024