How Group Photography Shapes Concepts of Community and Belonging

A brand new exhibition explores how group images has formed and mirrored concepts of neighborhood throughout historical past and into the current.

The exhibition, Community: Photography and Belonging, will probably be on show on the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany via May 25, 2026, and focuses on the multifaceted relationship between images and neighborhood. Bringing collectively round 270 works from the museum’s assortment alongside main loans, it explores how images each doc and affect collective life, from Nineteenth-century group portraits to modern digital imagery.

Communities take many types, from households and sports activities golf equipment to political teams, but the thought of belonging just isn’t straight seen. The exhibition reveals how images performs a central function in giving form to those connections. Photographs can exhibit inclusion inside a gaggle, however they will additionally outline who’s excluded.

“Photography is one of the most influential social media – it has been since long before what we now call social media existed, and it remains so today,” says Felix Krämer, Director General of the Kunstpalast. “It creates closeness and shapes identity, while also revealing how fragile a sense of belonging can be. This exhibition shows just how deeply our ideas of community are bound up with images.”

Group portraits are one of many clearest methods images reveals a way of belonging. From fastidiously organized studio portraits within the Nineteenth century to right this moment’s informal group selfies, folks come collectively in entrance of the digicam and place themselves to be a part of the picture. Families, pals, work colleagues, and membership members all use posing as a shared act that demonstrates connection. When these pictures are saved in albums, they help reminiscence, storytelling, and the upkeep of neighborhood.

Group images additionally observe unstated guidelines. The placement of people throughout the body can point out inclusion, exclusion, and relative standing. Six video works by Juliane Herrmann make this seen by filming teams as they organize themselves. Historical and modern group portraits, from nameless photographers to August Sander and Neal Slavin, present that pictures of communities don’t solely replicate social relationships — they actively form them.

“What interests me about photography is its dual effect,” says Linda Conze, curator of the exhibition and Head of the Kunstpalast Photography Department. “It makes people who appear together in an image seem naturally connected, while concealing those who are left out.”

More details about the Kunstpalast’s exhibition Community: Photography and Belonging will be discovered here.

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Image credit: All images courtesy of Kunstpalast.