City views from Stralsund to Bayreuth: Beautiful stone

From Rostock in the north to Freiburg in the south, from Monschau in the west to Görlitz in the east. The photographs by Jörg Dietrich show Germany's architectural diversity in a special way: The photographer digitally assembles the house fronts into panoramas.

For almost ten years he has traveled through Germany to capture cityscapes for his project "Germany Street Fronts". Meanwhile, his archive comprises around 250 locations.

The different photos make comparisons: what is typical in the West? What regional differences and traditions are there? What do cities and towns look like, what makes them different? What role does the architectural heritage play? "I want to show how cities come together and what hidden architectural diversity you can find," says Dietrich.

The Zöllnerstraße in Celle, for example, is the typical example of a half-timbered ensemble, as it is in many cities in Lower Saxony. The Bauhaus in Dessau exemplifies modern city architecture. But also prefabricated buildings from East and West Germany or the contemporary architecture of Hamburg's HafenCity can be seen.

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Nearly a hundred such city views from more than 40 cities in different regions of Germany are currently traveling across the USA in the exhibition "Germany Street Fronts". They are a contribution to the Year of German-American Friendship. A joint project of Goethe-Institut, Federation of German Industry and Foreign Office.

The actual selection of the house fronts takes place only in the post-processing: Dietrich looks at all photos on the computer and then selects the best for his panoramas. The motifs can be a tourist magnet or classic industrial architecture, but also buildings that show a specific problem.

Scale, crossfade, assemble: how a panorama is created

Dietrich photographed the houses from the front a few meters away. Then he works on the individual front views digitally on the computer: he corrects the perspective, scales, fades and assembles the individual images into a panorama. A time-consuming job that sometimes takes around a week.

The project will continue Dietrich - countless unprocessed images are still waiting in his archive, and there are more and more. He is currently photographing cities in the USA to show the differences between German and American building culture in new pictures.