The discovery of an unknown body of work: photographs of overwhelming elegance and precision. Architectural images from a bygone era. The photographic work of the Cologne architectural photographers Hugo (1879-1938) and Karl Hugo Schmölz (1917-1986) has been receiving significant and steadily growing recognition in recent years. After completing his apprenticeship as a photographer and numerous other positions, Schmölz Senior established himself as an architectural photographer in Cologne starting in 1911. Later, his son Karl Hugo took over the business. The long-forgotten work of the two photographers now presents itself in its aesthetic and technical perfection as breathtakingly unique. Through the invention of a special additive exposure technique, Schmölz was able to document dark interiors with overwhelming elegance and detail accuracy as early as the beginning of the century. The book for the first time gathers a series of photographs taken predominantly in the Rhineland and the Ruhr area between 1935 and 1957, featuring newly constructed cinema halls of that time. The interiors, which are mostly destroyed today, appear almost sculptural in the photographs shaped by light, certainly not nostalgic, but strangely detached from time, with their finest shades of gray almost hyperreal.