A prominent German photography agency has collaborated with a local news agency as part of a touring photography exhibition that puts a focus on cities, their inhabitants and urbanization.

A series of photo essays under the title Die Stadt '€” Vom Werden und Vergehen (The City '€” Becoming and Decaying) will be exhibited at the National Gallery in Central Jakarta until Feb. 7.

Die Stadt is the collective work of 18 photographers from the German agency Ostkreuz. From 2008 to 2010, they spread out across the globe to explore the urban realities of today.

Each of them captured their personal impressions from a total of 22 cities, including Dubai, Shanghai, Detroit, Manila, Las Vegas, Berlin, Gaza and Pripyat.

The visual essays show various stages that cities of the world are in: those that are nascent, those rapidly growing, thriving as metropolises, and those that have begun to implode and deteriorate.

Ostkreuz was established by seven photographers in Berlin, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and has since become one of Germany'€™s most important photo agencies. Almost all of its current members have received national and international awards.

Jörg Brüggemann, one of the 18 photographers from Ostkreuz, said that the agency does collective group projects every few years.

'€œOne day when we were planning another collective work, we heard a statistic that said there were more people around the world living in cities than in the country. We decided that would be our starting point and we prepared ourselves to look at cities in our modern age,'€ Brüggemann told reporters at the exhibition opening at the National Gallery.

Among the ideas the photographers investigated in their journeys were the sort of hopes and dreams bound up by cities and the ways in which cities influence everyday life as well as people'€™s relationships with the environment and their fellow human beings.

'€œWe want to know how these cities form the people and how the people form these cities,'€ Brüggemann said.

A different element in Jakarta'€™s Die Stadt exhibition, which did not feature in exhibitions in Germany, India, Russia and Vietnam, was the inclusion of an essay in the same thematic vein by a local photographer.

Brüggemann curated the Jakarta exhibition in cooperation with Oscar Motuloh, director of the photography division at the state news agency Antara. Both of them chose a number of works by Antara photographer Fanny Octavianus.

'€œThe inclusion of Fanny'€™s work is very interesting because we started this project from a very German perspective and very Western point of view, because we are all German.

'€œIncluding a contemporary Indonesian view in the exhibition makes a lot of sense. I hope in this way, we can help visitors in Jakarta to relate to the exhibition and to understand how this relates to them,'€ Brüggemann said.

Fanny has developed his own perspective of Jakarta after working for seven years at Antara. He has accumulated works that demonstrate the absurdity, complexity and tension of his experience into a book called JKT, which is slated for release later this year.

Felix Hofmann, in his curatorial note to the Die Stadt photo book, said that in showing the becoming and decaying of the city, the visual works convey the eternal game of chaos and order.

'€œChaos and order, order and chaos, are ultimately the essence of all life. People keep this game moving without being aware of its rules.

'€œSometimes they are just passive players who seem to have no influence on how things unfold. Sometimes in the midst of chaos they behave as if they were searching for order. Sometimes in places dominated by order they try to preserve something individual. Sometimes they stand on the sidelines as if hoping to be excluded from the game,'€ Hofmann wrote.

'€” Photos by JP/Jerry Adiguna