This is what one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the lighthouse of Alexandria looks like today - or more accurately, this is what the scene looks like, since it’s gone. Find the rest of the wonders in Hans Engels’ The Seven Wonders.
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Ralf Brück’s Distortion contains quite a few very interesting images. Not all of them work for me, but the ones that do are very successful.
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I suppose it’s easiest to think of the young women who contort themselves as part of their warm-up routine in M. Schwarzer’s Garde & Mariechen as folk cheerleaders. If you want to know more about this and see some in action have a look at this video (which, I must warn you, you will not be able to unsee) or this video (basically a mix of Toddlers & Tiaras and the Can Can, start watching at 1min00 in).
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This is an image from Paula Markert’s wonderful Die Verhältnisse, dealing with family life and relationships in ways that I’ve rarely seen. Unfortunately, there is no English translation for the quotes used throughout the piece.
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This is a spread from Marina Weigl’s Horse and I. Those with a sense of humour might also enjoy her Class of 2009.
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I don’t know whether Liverpool by Eric Meier is most necessarily his most representative work, but it simply interests me the most.
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Bigi Möhrle’s Alp - about a farm, making cheese, in the Alps - is almost a bit too idyllic. Beautiful. (via)
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Beyond by Loredana Nemes portrays the world inside Turkish and Arab men-only cafes in Berlin - from the outside. The photographer is barred from entering.
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“On the biggest cemetery of Europe in Hamburg up to 1.7 million people are buried. This cemetery is more than a burial ground. It is a mystic place of the grief and the stop, as well as a workplace for numerous people who have to deal with the death every day.” - Jan-Christoph Hartung about his Memento Mori
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Nina Röder’s Teresia photographically reconstructs scenes from the photographer’s grandmother’s life (who had been expelled from her home at the end of World War II).
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“Is nature behaving correctly?” - Clemens Bechmann (via)
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With DL07 stereotypes of war, a photographic investigation, Jens Liebchen investigates the visual language of photojournalism covering war.
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Christian Tiefensee’s Refugium (pdf download) mixes photography from different sources - his own images plus found ones - to create a body of work that centers on the idea of, well, refuge.
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This is a photo from Simone Rosenbauer’s borderline overwhelming Small Museum (104 photos!).
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I quite like Jennifer Braun’s Irgendwo. I wish there were more images, it’s a very poetic series (even though it is somewhat marred by the - German-language only - statement). (via)
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“I follow the traces of art made in the former GDR. On the one hand I take photographs of the blank spaces in rooms or on the walls or facades that were appeared when pictures were taken away or painted over after the cultural and political turn in 1989. On the other hand I visit archives or storages where images with an uncertain future are stored or forgotten.” - Margret Hoppe about her Vanishing Images
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Christine Bachmann’s Undine Geht contains portraits of women, based on a novella by Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. (via)
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Mirko Martin’s L.A. Crash slyly mixes factual and fictional elements to create a view of L.A. that is as fake as the city’s image itself.
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For her series The time in between, Helena Schätzle visited locations her own grandfather had been to in 1945/46, to photograph the landscape and the older generation living there. (thank you, Lia!)
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Peter of Sonic Blog fame just published a list of German photographers looking at Germany, what it means to be German, or other aspects of their own country. Have a peek!
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I’m always a little bit surprised how few German photographers explore what being German might mean. This is especially surprising in the light of both German history and what’s going on in the country (there’s a very large pool of immigrants, for example). In fact, there are probably more German photographers who went to the US taking photos of cowboys than artists turning their lenses towards their own country. And when the lens is turned that way, there are no people (one could argue that the Düsseldorf School is basically completely apolitical). So I was glad to find Marita Bullmann’s Es gibt immer was zu tun [There’s always something to do] (here) today. I’d like to see more like that.
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This image is from Frank Gaudlitz’s Casa Mare, which features interiors and portraits taken in southern and central Eastern Europe. Beautiful work.
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Carina Linge’s work is very conceptual, and unfortunately, all the text (apart from the menu titles) is only in German. But check out the projects anyway, it’s an interesting mix of images.
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Peter Freitag’s “collages of ‘Private Stages’ take amateur photographs of nudes from the Internet and undermine the original intention of the images through a simple process of interference.” Brilliant! And the rest of his work is as good as this. (via)
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Jörn Vanhöfen’s Detroit (pdf) is still work in progress, and I’m looking forward to seeing the final result. I do like the presentation in the pdf quite a bit.
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The story of Detroit is well known, the story of East German cities hemorrhaging people less so. Nico Baumgarten’s the time has come, get me out of here portrays Dessau, in the 1920s the city of the Bauhaus.
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Karsten Kronas’ “photo series tells of Beyo?lu, one of the many diverse and contrast-rich urban milieus in the metropolis of Istanbul. […] Kronas’ photo series focuses on the transgender scene in Beyo?lu, mostly showing prostitutes who are part of the transsexual subculture. Their ambiguous bodies are set against the geographic patterns of the city.” (source)
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Oliver Farrnbacher’s Andacht (here: a mix between prayer and reverence) pairs images taken in churches with images taken in the woods. Notes the photographer: “For this [Andacht - JMC] you need a quiet place that has an atmosphere of solitude and ‘holyness’, and for me there are two such places: churches and forests.” (via)
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Thomas Wieland’s Neuperlach portrays the drab Munich suburb. (via)
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After the Wall came down, many of East Germany’s “guest workers” (to use the West German term) had to go back home. There were around 16,000 such workers from Mozambique. East Germany had sent money to the government of Mozambique - the former workers haven’t seen any of it, and most are living in poverty now. This is the subject of Malte Wandel’s Einheit, Arbeit, Wachsamkeit. Unfortunately, the text and interviews are in German only.
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Ulrike Brückner’s space for uses images found on the web. But instead of using them as is, the artist places the people into a neutral environment - thus creating one of the best such projects I’ve seen in a long time.
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This photo looks like some sort of conceptual photo piece (think something coming out of Rietveld Academie). It isn’t. It’s not staged. It’s part of Uwe H. Martin’s series about narcolepsy. The woman in the photo, Lisa, suffered from an episode of cataplexy, “a condition whereby the sufferer or cataleptic experiences a total loss of muscle control and postural tone.” Martin quotes Lisa as saying “I had a full cataplexy in Aarau. I was lying on the street, not being able to talk or act. For other people it looks as if I am unconsciousness [sic!] and many just stare or walk by. Someone just pushed me a bit with his shoe. Well you need to be careful - it could be something poisonous on this woman.” After making sure that everything was in fact OK, Martin asked her whether he could take a photo (she was able to blink - once for yes, twice for no), and she said he could (see this interview, unfortunately only in German).
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Verena Brandt’s Villa Germania portrays German expats, most of them retirees, living in a town in Thailand.
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Michael Frahm describes the images in his The Exercise of Look and Fail to See as “cinematographic portraits” of the subjects’ “personality in apparently complete isolation.”
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Dawin Meckel’s portrait of Detroit is by far the best I’ve seen so far. Instead of focusing on ruins, Dawin went to include a much wider view, and he took photos of people living in Detroit. You can probably still debate whether his is the “true” Detroit (who is to say really?), but I wager nobody will think of “ruin porn”.
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“Between then and now is a documentary project about people and places from a vanishing world. This vanishing world is situated in the Bavarian Forest, which is characterized by its rural structure and which is undergoing massive shifts from a traditional to a modern society.” - Evi Lemberger
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Tim Hölscher’s Tankstellen are 1950s gas stations, digitally re-set to their original states. Equally noteworthy: Peisazhet e Shqiperise, photographs taken with some of the ubiquitous Albanian bunkers the earlier Communist regimes littered the landscape with - the artist converted them into pin-hole cameras.
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Sebastian Keitel’s home is a typology of very improvised living quarters of Vietnamese migrant workers.
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Delia Keller’s work has a very cinematic feel to it, even when showing places as unglamourous as a class room.
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Katrin Kamrau’s Flämisches Fragment (download the pdf to see the work) is based on Flemish paintings and on the fact that since the time Flemish masterpiece paintings were made, we have lost our ideas of what plants (or fruit) might mean when used in pieces of art.
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Friederike Brandenburg’s photography centers on landscape photography, and even though there doesn’t appear to be any text you can easily figure out what is going on in the different bodies of work on her site. Beautiful work!
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When linking to Hanna Witte’s Nacht.Leben [“Night Life”], Peter Feldhaus noted that the work looked “very clean.” And he’s right, things are a bit too slick, a bit too commercial looking for my taste, but the series is nice nevertheless.
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Andrea Engelke’s Ohrenbetäubende Stille [deafening silence] portrays people suffering from chronic pain.
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“If Andre LeNotre, the architect of the gardens of Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles would present a design for a garden today, he would most certainly do this with form.z or any other 3-D graphic software. Detailed studies of the various elements might look like these pictures.” - Jürgen Bergbauer (via)
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Daniel Schumann’s Elisabeth und Wilhelm is a portrait of his grandparents. His grandmother died while he was away, and his grandfather is now suffering from dementia. The combination of portraiture and photography found in family albums creates a compelling project.
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“Between 1995 and 2007 more than 200,000 farmers committed suicide in India. […] In my view, this is an act of helplessness in a state of momentary despair: a call to society for help. Help not only for the farmer’s immediate family members - widowed wife, old and ailing parents, young children, but also for farming in general and for other farmers, like him.” - Verena Hanschke/Floriana Gavriel (thanks, Hugh!)
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Ulrich Gebert is one of those German photographers who are so conceptual that they don’t even have a website (or whose website is so obscure that I can’t find it). Regardless, even though very conceptual photography sometimes is a bit hard to digest, when well done - as it is in his case - it can be an incredibly rewarding experience. His current show at Winkleman Gallery is still up until February 13, 2010, so if you’re in New York here’s your chance to see the artist’s work. Everybody else might have to be happy with only seeing this pdf portfolio (which is quite nice actually).
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Melanie Vogel’s Jitter intentionally uses digital artifacts in the work. I’ve always wondered why photographers don’t do this more - might this be the digital equivalent of film toy-camera photography?
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Christian Hagemann’s In your face, God! appeals to the astronomer and critic in me: It shows crumpled images of cosmic objects, in which the flash-light reflections from the creases and crinkles look just like stars.
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When I’m in the car with my wife and we come across a pile of dirt or rubble or sand (or anything likes that), she likes to tease me by pointing out that there is a great photo opportunity. It is true that there are quite a few (male) photographers who have whole portfolios of these kinds of piles, such as Nils Kilnger (found today at Hippolyte Bayard). The website is in German only, but you can probably find your way around. The “Fields” are very nice, btw (even though the images on the website are a bit too small to do the photographs any justice).
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