Max Näder (1915 — 2009) made a name for him­self as the owner and long–stand­ing head of the Ottobock com­pa­ny. Only few peo­ple knew, how­ev­er, that he was also an ac­com­plished pho­tog­ra­pher with a highly de­vel­oped aware­ness of graph­ical struc­tures and im­age com­po­si­tion. The pho­to­graphs shown in this ex­hi­bi­tion were taken in the mid to late 1950s dur­ing var­i­ous busi­ness trips which took him and his wife Maria across the United States and Mexico. His pic­tures show America as Germans per­ceived it un­der the im­pres­sion of the eco­nom­ic mir­a­cle: as a prom­ise of a bet­ter life.

The ex­hi­bi­tion is ar­range in five sub­ject ar­eas: City Life, On the Road, People, Ar­chi­tec­ture, and Land­scape. In ad­di­tion, a sep­a­rate ex­hi­bi­tio space shows the United States as a pro­jec­tion screen for German dreams in the 1950s.

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