This agency is called OSTKREUZ. That is the name of an S-Bahn station in Berlin, which resembles a wind rose, as it combines lines from all directions. When, in the fall of 1990, seven men and women got together to found the agency, they named it thus.

With this they described their location, the East, which had been a country just a moment ago and to whose best photographers they had belonged. At the same time it meant to them a point from which they could start a journey to anywhere.

Today OSTKREUZ is the most successful agency led by photographers in all of Germany. It has eighteen members. Almost each one of them has won prestigious national or international awards. They come from all German regions and also from other countries. The youngest of them is in his mid-twenties, the oldest in her mid-sixties. Each of them looks at the world through different eyes, is interested in different parts of it and travels in a different direction. But they all share their point of departure and return, where they frequently meet again. This is OSTKREUZ. It is an approach. It means approaching reality. There finding material to work with. Finding the quintessence of things through ones work, imaging it and staying honest while doing so. It means developing a bearing towards reality, measuring it against it without having to sacrifice one for the other. OSTKREUZ means no more or less than being genuine.(Marcus Jauer)

The photographers involved in the E·CO project will be depicting the impact on mankind as well as national dilemmas of the use of nuclear material in power plants, nuclear devastation and nuclear waste problematique, as well as the atomic bomb.

Thomas Meyer/OSTKREUZ