The Rhine II, 1999 There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. It is as though he holds up a peopled landscape or a building or a workplace for our inspection, saying simply, ‘here it is’. The Iron Cage of Boredom By Julian Stallabrass There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. […]
Almost always working in series, Ruff frequently develops new technologies to facilitate concepts that are at the edge of visual and technical vanguards. By Vladimir Gintoff, ASX, April 2013 The German photographer Thomas Ruff is the anomalous schoolchild of the Dusseldorf Art Academy and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s tutelage. Breaking and reinventing the rules […]
Kommingen, 2007 Gerry Johansson “Deutschland” at Swedish Photography, 2013 By Sören Schuhmacher, ASX Germany, April 2013 In 1993 and 2005 to 2012 Gerry Johansson drove through the German countryside, visiting 176 places like Alt Horsbüll, Gelsenkirchen or Solingen. He divided Germany into nine sectors, which he then traveled systematically. Rather than visiting only major cities, […]
Not Fade Away: The Face of German History in Michael Schmidt’s Ein-heit By Michael W. Jennings, October, 2003 Fotografieren verboten. Photography forbidden. Is this the coded message that stutters at us in a central image from the photoessay U-ni-ty (Ein-heit) by the contemporary Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt? The cropped image of a sign, perhaps a […]
By Hans-Michael Koetzle In 1910, August Sander began a systematic attempt to portray and typologize his fellow countrymen. The project, undertaken wholly at his own initiative and expense, found support only among his painter friends in the Rhineland area of Germany. His book Antlitz der Zeit was outlawed and partially destroyed by the Nazis in […]
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” Ezra Pound By Russell Ferguson Wolfgang Tillmans has consistently pushed back against whatever perceptions of his work seem most current. If he is thought of as a casual, snapshot photographer, he produces a book of formal portraits. If he is […]