The Machines Nobody Cleans

There’s a particular pleasure in noticing what everyone else ignores. Not the landmark, not the poster-sized ad—the battered gumball machine bolted to a wall in Kreuzberg, its coin slot jammed, its capsules long since expired. Max Schwarck spent two years noticing those.

Between 2015 and 2016, he walked through Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Friedrichshain, Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg, and Mitte, photographing every one of these machines he could find, always in the exact state he discovered it—no staging, no wiping down the glass, no repositioning. Whatever the thing looked like at the moment he arrived was the portrait. After two years of shooting, collecting, editing, and selecting, he had seventy images.

Freed from their urban context and placed against solid-color backgrounds, the machines read as something between folk art and industrial archaeology—carriers of stickers, scratches, spray paint, and coin-slot grease accumulated across decades of being present but invisible. Max condensed the whole series into a single large poster: a Wimmelbild, a densely packed image you can genuinely get lost in, of cultural messages the street quietly left behind.

If you walk those same side streets with any real attention now, you’ll start recognizing individual machines from the poster. That’s the thing about invisible objects—once someone makes you see one, you can’t stop. I’ve shot a lot of Berlin street textures over the years and this kind of obsessive documentation hits differently than most art photography. It’s less about the image and more about the discipline: the commitment to a subject nobody thought was worth having a subject at all. Two years. Seventy machines. One Wimmelbild.