Sonderausstellung „Landschaft als kulturelles Gedächtnis in der Fotografie"

Special exhibition “Landscape as Cultural Memory in Photography”

Those who stroll down Wassergasse and Gerbergasse in Annweiler am Trifels, with the babbling stream Queich to the side, the half-timbered facades of the old tanners' houses in view, and the castle trinity towering above, are moving through a piece of built memory. Castles, Staufer, Frederick II, Richard the Lionheart – hardly any region in the Palatinate showcases the layers of its history as openly as the Trifelsland. That this memory can not only be condensed in stone and wood but also in photographic images is demonstrated by the new special exhibition “Landscape as Cultural Memory in Photography” by Palatine photographer and author Yannick Scherthan at the museum under the Trifels, which is itself part of this picturesque cultural heritage.
Scherthan's work has been revolving for years around the question of how a landscape tells its story and how photography preserves that story for posterity. Palatinate Forest and Wine Road, the mythical rock formations of sandstone, the silent ruins of castles in the Palatinate Forest, the light moods over the vineyard slopes – all of this is not understood by the native Palatinate as mere backdrop, but as a space of cultural memory. A landscape that remembers. A landscape in whose lines generations of human activity have been inscribed.
The exhibition brings together large-format fine art prints from Scherthan's photographic work: landscape as print, as book page, and as a tactile counterpart in the digital age of screen floods.
The exhibition will be presented as part of the event series “UNFOLD: A Journey Through the PAPER CULTURE of the Palatinate and Alsace” of the Rhineland-Palatinate Cultural Summer 2026 from July 1 to August 31, 2026.