The Brooklyn Rail

For artists making typologies, achieving total comprehensiveness has proven time and again to be impossible. Their main disadvantage is that, even when rigorous, they tend to remain ambiguous. This conundrum lies at the heart of Tata Ronkholz’s Trinkhallen, a publication that gathers over a hundred primarily black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1984, of the shops, sheds, bars, kiosks, and shacks that once enjoyed widespread popularity across Western Germany.

Despite “Trinkhallen” being Ronkholz’s best-known work, her relative obscurity is twofold: she abandoned her art career shortly after completing this series and sadly passed away in 1997. This book makes Ronkholz’s legacy available to a broader audience, especially to the uninitiated in the history of the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Ronkholz was part of the first generation of students of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and her pictures are close in spirit to those of her mentors. But what distinguishes Ronkholz’s work is her reluctance to reduce her subjects to a formalist abstraction. An emphasis on defining an object’s essence is a common characteristic of artists working with typologies, a practice traceable to the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s. In this sense, Trinkhallen aligns closely with the ethos of the Bechers, creating an archive that prompts viewers to grant their attention to common places and objects that often go unnoticed. As a result, Ronkholz’s subjects become a conduit for a multiplicity of associations, from the importance of independent commerce and mixed-use urban development to the decrease of cigarette advertising in comparison to the seventies.

But just like her mentors, Ronkholz wasn’t interested in using photography to make an overt political commentary, perhaps fearful that such a conceptual framing could be too didactic or misunderstood. Yet the presence of text in Ronkholz’s images makes their social—and therefore political—context easier to grasp than in the structures depicted by the Bechers. In fact, another way of looking at the series is as a sui generis study of commercial signs and advertisements before Germany’s reunification, which is also the moment before global brands conquered the urban landscape. Visible in the images are products on offer, typically snacks, refreshments, newspapers, and cigarettes. In some of Ronkholz’s images, we get a glimpse of the surrounding urban landscape of Düsseldorf and Cologne, where most of the photographs were taken. Other aspects of interest are the preferred designation of the commerce (words like “Imbiss” and “Verkaufshalle” give out different vibes), the peculiar convention of displaying the storekeeper’s name on the façade, or the narrow variety of sponsors (principally Coca-Cola, but often a beer brand).

These family-owned shops have slowly given way to corporate ones, transforming the dynamics of the small entrepreneurial economy. Flipping through the book, it is easy to feel as if Ronkholz had somehow sensed these shops were doomed to disappear.

The pictures in Trinkhallen are not only technically excellent but are also unconventionally charming, a more elusive characteristic that not everyone ascribes to those same places in real life. This charm is often found in little details across the pictures: a couple of cheap deflated footballs (probably suitable only for a sporting emergency), a dispenser of PEZ candy, or the dueling standees of competing cigarette brands (a real mustached man exuding sex appeal against a Hanna-Barbera-ish cartoon of a man with a giant necktie). As such, the series is an example of how deadpan pictures, which appear to be objective records, can elicit a multiplicity of emotions, including a sense of kitsch, which puts them in dialogue with contemporaneous German Pop artists like Martin Kippenberger and Sigmar Polke.

The book’s design—landscape orientation, glossy paper, sans serif typography, and a repetitive layout—aligns with the aesthetics and conventions of the time during which Ronkholz made the work. The book easily functions as a catalogue/archive of the series, an aim that explains the inclusion of lesser-known interior shots and a few color pictures. Typologies are also fascinating because they fall somewhere between art and science. This one in particular constitutes an abstract spatial chronicle of a formerly divided country. Still, at a distance of forty years, we cannot afford to just accept nostalgic power of Trinkhallen. Ronkholz’s images demand to be processed with sobriety, given Germany’s long history of political parties using tradition for ideological manipulation.