Hütte ranks among the leading protagonists of contemporary landscape photography; since the late 1970s, he has made a substantial contribution to the self-assured standing of photography in visual art. Like his fellow artists from the Düsseldorf School of Photography (Becher School) such as Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, or Thomas Struth, Hütte stands for the tableau character of the photographic image as an equivalent counterpart of painting. Axel Hütte's artistic work started out in the late 1970s with stark objectification of the reality of portraits as well as urban interiors and exteriors. In the early 1990s, the artist turned to considerably larger picture sizes, with landscape becoming his dominant theme. Unlike his earlier documentary pictures, the more recent large-format works have more of an imaginative and hallucinatory dimension.