On View
IPO: The Stock Market Listing as Spectacle
Photographs 1980–2024
September 15, 2025 – June 30, 2026
Curated by Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Brunnhuber
Exhibition Text
“Seven photographs. Six IPOs. Forty-four years. The series hangs chronologically from the Apple listing of December 1980 to Uber in 2019 — each image shot in the documentary manner of Saul Leiter, atmospheric and slightly unfocused, as if the camera itself were uncertain. Which it should be.”
The complete photography series documents six decades of technology IPOs in the documentary tradition of Saul Leiter: atmospheric, unfocused, human. Each stock market listing as a cultural event — hope, speculation, and the peculiar silence that follows.
Works in the Exhibition(7)
Initial Public Offering: Apple Computer, December 12, 1980
AKU Photo Archive (archival print), 1980
C-print, archival pigment ink
AKU-2001-002
Initial Public Offering: Amazon, May 15, 1997
AKU Photo Archive (after Saul Leiter), 1997
C-print, vintage
AKU-2005-014
Initial Public Offering: Google, August 19, 2004
AKU Photo Archive (after Saul Leiter), 2004
C-print, diasec mounted
AKU-2007-031
Initial Public Offering: Twitter, November 7, 2013
AKU Photo Archive (after Saul Leiter), 2013
C-print, diasec mounted
AKU-2015-022
Initial Public Offering: Facebook, May 18, 2012
AKU Photo Archive (after Saul Leiter), 2012
C-print, diasec mounted
AKU-2014-007
Initial Public Offering: Uber, May 10, 2019
AKU Photo Archive (after Saul Leiter), 2019
C-print, diasec mounted
AKU-2021-017
The Annual General Meeting (Documentary Series)
AKU Photo Archive, 2023
C-print diptych
AKU-2023-055
