Innere Angelegenheiten

Innere Angelegenheiten presents a photographic series by German photographer Dirk Reinartz, produced between 1989 and 2002 in various regions of Germany.

The photographs depict streets, squares, buildings, and urban or semi-urban spaces marked by an absence of visible human activity. Rather than documenting events or social interaction, the images focus on spatial structures shaped by regulation, order, and latent control.

Reinartz’s photographs articulate a visual language of emptiness and suspension, in which traces of human presence remain without the presence of people themselves. The depicted environments evoke psychological and social conditions, suggesting states of expectation, normalization, and restrained movement within the public sphere. In this work, Reinartz continues his exploration of the German landscape in color, following earlier black-and-white projects that examined national identity and collective memory.

Innere Angelegenheiten can be read as a reflection on the relationship between space, authority, and perception in post-reunification Germany. The series positions architectural and infrastructural settings as carriers of social meaning, revealing how seemingly neutral environments participate in the production of collective experience and internalized order.