Photo: Dr.UR, Mering


A better city?


Just imagine, there is a city and nobody lives in... maybe it won't matter? To safeguard the statistical licence the people are just moved to the edge. There, they form a figurative, based on images of the city that could perhaps be whitened. To fit then the ornament of the city's modern architecture in glass transparency, marbling whiteness and the party line of stone...


"ITALIAN MASTERPIECES TO ENJOY" * Photo: Ritter, Mering.


Such the modern Rome, photographed by Massimo Siragusa. Correct, not distorting photography with wide-angle, bright, quiet, classical. Marble is as a typical element of the Roman Catholic self on the stage. In Rome as usual, almost inevitably, the marble is focusing - in almost all photos actually - unconsciously or as a joke – up on top, heaven in particular - even if this is not in the picture. The statues lift at least one arm and look up to the sun, as such the camera. Even a flat facade of a restaurant in renaissance style can evoke this effect, when it is brutally cut off just above, and we 'see' the sky by missing „him“. The di Trevi Fountain, just marblewhite in the background, in the foreground a statue with gloriole and the arm leading skyward. Massimo Siragusa, what an Italian!


Photo: Jordi Bernadó, Barcelona, in: A better city.

For central Italy God and marble are just simply standard. For the wooden gray Germany marble is much more connected with Egyptian menhir and Mussolini, at its best with English castles like the spooky Marlborough Castle. Well thus, these stairs by Massimo are simply too smooth for me. The city of the future – shock comes lightly. We would be away ...

Yes - who occasionally reads ARTS-On.COM or the ARTOU „Kunstbrief“ already knows that we do not simply fraternize and nestle now on the chest of the Barcelona photographer Jordi Bernadó, to be almost randomly once portrayed in a catalogue delicacies such as "A better city" produced on GardaPat 13 KIARA 150g/m2 of the sponsor Garda Cartiere. We! is first of all to cuddle with photos that are not so cold and common as stone - but (in the figurative sense, of course) smell funny and taste our guinea pigs too. So grass. Green, greener, most green. So England. England, England. The island, which is still proud of its rainy weather. That only exists by the Gulf Stream, and in continental situation would be colder than Siberia. This city London is in the photos by Stephen Gill, a wheelbarrow full-Sissinghurst freshly cut lawn. Who knows London, regardless of the End - knows - more than a funny idea. Around its parks London is stone and vinyl, hundreds of miles along - the journey to Heathrow, London's biggest element of ecological crime, is counting as extension of the city for this time. Even Oxford has no green inner life. Lawn nestles in England foremost from the outside or in kidney like ovals, tortured by tourney ponies, on low stone clusters, which represent so that they had to tale back for centuries on elegant turf but not on the overall problem "green" and „city's ecology“. The green wheelbarrows with freshly cut that glitters like gold in the skin of a satin guinea pig - an utopia?



Photo: Stephen Gill, London, in: A better city.

Much closer to the real London are the photos of Prague, Missirkov & Bogdanov put as "better draft" of their city together. Prague, the casualist among European cities, whose roadsides quickly run out of tires thrown down for a soapbox race there. The „Bauzens“, their companion a dog with dark eye rings, which we trust the dodger, x-encased clothed passers - truly passing along at the camera not caring about the image the camera will create of them and will perhaps go around the world - this fantastic indifference to the constraints of luxury and fashion is Prague in the eyes of the photographers. The photographed Prague, in its strong moments exposed Prague, then, the renaissance of the almost utopian neosocialism in real? The unimposing of course, the sinking in colorful goings of fellows .... ehm.... utopias with obvious defects?


Photo: Missirkov & Bogdanov, Prague, , in: A better city.



Having time to stand in the city and view it from the top down. To see its strange and busy growing, oneself rigid and conform to what is growing: Beijing (?) in the eyes of Weng Fen. His models in school uniforms are more than obvious metaphors: Conform, uniform, high form. Staged scenes, creating silence and restlessness. Utopias as symbols of intolerabe situations in their adolescents? Frantic gap of western and eastern Habiti? Eastern Europe, non-Asian, you're so close, my pillow against the Asian drawing board. Now the USA; Seattle, or Mumbai, Athens, the idea of the special, anywhere minimally shaped and almost trivial in the expectations of the country and its self consciousness, only confirming thisThe utopias of the world city and "better" city - only an advertising campaign for aspects of the real, with photographs highlighted and synekdochisch overstaged?


Foto: Photo: Dr.UR, Mering.


A slowed up counter-example: Seattle, Stuart Isett. The website of the photographerhttp://www.isett.com/ gives a quick American professional-style to acknowledge: wide-angle or panoramic pictures, ornamental surfaces (eg repetitive, eye-catching shade configurations), Landscape and reality issues. The images are technically more decorative, actually quite contentless. But in the catalogue book, probably inspired by a theme and the happy coincidence that one's own home town something offers something interesting, a photographic funny, but also reductive technical documentation of a green protest movement and urban initiatives to combat the rise of U'.S.'s CO2 and Kyoto.


Photo: Dr.UR, Mering

These aspects of the real, the initiative of ecologically minded mayors, is also fortunately not as an utopian ideal city to reality but as a "better city". On the other hand, from the photos, you cannot learn how Seattle necessarily is a special case, or the environmentally friendly initiatives transferable into other cities. The Prague photographers, Missirkov & Bogdanov, show in the series *ID 2000+ particularly successful sexually "aggressive" women, with these pictures on various websites. And whoops – we recognize that the photo "Drogheria Rossmann" in the catalogue shows a young girl while walking into the Drogheria, with a fine body figure and waring mini skirts, boots, fair hair, etc. etc. ... In the foreground further examples of different shape and design ....


Again a quick glance at the sites of the artists among the photographers in the book "A better city", with the most individualistic and strangest pictures, so again Weng Fens terrible „state of bees“ - architecture, Stephen Gill's Londoner lawns, finally Alexey Titarenkos Petersburg:



Photo: Dr.UR, Mering

"Accumulating eggs / Weng Peijun's terrific new world" was Weng Fen's project before Beijing, and because Weng Peijun stands for the view, "there is nothing more dangerous than to pile up eggs," we are exactly right with our state-bee judgement on the conformist buildings. The girls on the roofs are - in their school uniforms - almost selbstdenuntiating "bees", China a horrible matriachat in which no individuality is possible .... (I'm just closing the book. Although it is probably the only critical photographer.)


Gill: Actually "documents, documents, documents". How hard and vulgar a common art can behave towards their representatives shows the difference between Stephen Gill's work in the exhibition "State of Work-work in a state of uncertainty" in which he photographs mainly waste, scrap and things to the next, and the green images in the catalogue „A better city“, that are lush, Baroque, turfy, juicy, swapping around the lens, widespread, dense and deep. As beautiful as the lawnpics are, as cruel seems the otherwise usual documentarian approach to its artist, with such eyes for natural glamour.


Photo: Yannis Kontos, Athens, from A better city. in: A better city.



Then there was still Alexey Titarenko to take a deepened look on. The images of St. Petersburg meet in a romantic way Tolstoij would not have managed better, our fears against the Russian winter and of fates politically critical writers like Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) suffered, which, once he left Duke August's and Anna Amalie's Weimar to search for protection by Katharina II., just found cold streets in Moscow .... Titarenko's website http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/ shows photos in black and white, on which the human characters are such repeatedly exposed and blurry, that they become a kind of vague - menacing fog, a natural disaster or force of nature, like moving sea water, storms and what other natural events are in St. Petersburg to fear. http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/ Auf der Webseite dieses Fotografen (Titarenko, nicht Lenz) sieht man Fotos in schwarz-weiß, auf denen die menschlichen Figuren so mehrfach belichtet und verschwommen sind, dass sie eine Art diffus - bedrohlichen Nebel bilden, eine Naturkatastrophe oder Naturgewalt, so ähnlich wie bewegtes Meerwasser, Unwetter und was man in St. Petersburg oder anderswo sonst noch fürchten mag.


Photo: Dr.UR, Mering


Atul Lokes photos of Mumbai, Yannis Konto's portraits of Athenians and Berlin by Frank Rothe are also worth the catalogue, with its approximately five kilos, beautiful colors and lush square format - a book you need, if you simply want to enjoy art like a salade out of champignons with special ingredients. Perhaps even ideal as a gift or to birng his friends in a good mood, accompanied by a cappuccino...


Catalogue:

A better city. Seattle, London, Barcelona, Rome, Berlin, Prague, Athens, St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Beijing. Cartiere del Garda 2007. Cartiere del Garda 2007. With Photographs by Stuart Isett, Stephen Gill, Frank Rothe, Missirkov & Bogdanov, Alexey Titarenko, Weng Fen, Atul Loke, Massimo Siragusa, Jordi Bernadó, Yannis Konto. In Italian and English, 161 pages, 108 color plates, 27 cm x 27 cm.


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erich.clefprahm@papierunion.de


Report: Dr. Ulrike Ritter