From image to Icon
Masterclass of Fine Art Photography of Bernhard & Hilla Becher at the Fine Arts Academy Dusseldorf, Germany
Beetles look darkly heroic at us. Together, the join for a new form of primordial unity. But not the family members who appear to us in a complicated social network which may reveal the entire complexity of childhood, adulthood roles and changes of roles in a family in a tangible web that may be revealed in every image as the knowledge of the author.
This is the case with the Becher Students. The observed object is not the theme, but the idea of a certain image, a sound, a color space, something abstract that units all the images of a series. The single image serves only as a staircase to a higher-level sphere into which the initially obvious object integrates into an idea of another level of the photographic image.
When viewed from a historical distance, a landscape arises, houses become memorials and wall paintings, delayed city views, utopian ideas of a new social structure and images become surrogates of what has happened and a possible distance from today's viewer.
Halls are reduced, irritated, combined with an idea of many-faceted industrial buildings, such as prototypes, or their generalization to universal types. For this reason, they stand as a visionary, spreading their colored surfaces to light and horizon, and grow into abstract sculptures of an almost infinite surface of timelessness.
Although each of these photographers is manifestly devoted to a subject, they all have a distant view, a respectful distance to the subject that summarizes, abstracts and creates a very own image and delivers it in a new form
From image to Icon The Masterclass of Fine Art Photography of Bernhard & Hilla Becher at the Fine Arts Academy Dusseldorf, Germany
September 19 - 25, 2017
Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, Peoples Republic of China
participatings artists: Goetz Diergarten, Chris Durham, Claudia Fährenkemper, Claus Goedicke, Christof Klute, Matthias Koch, Katharina Mayer, Thomas Neumann, Josef Schulz.
"We want to offer the audience a point of view, or rather a grammar, to understand and compare the different structures. Through photography, we try to arrange these shapes and render them comparable. To do so, the objects must be isolated from their context and freed from all association" Bernd and Hilla Becher
Thank you to Mr. Zhang Guotian, Amy, Cloe and all the volunteers and interpreters making this festival a wonderful and an experience of a high level proffessionality. Thank you to the participants of this show for trusting us to deliver a great show to the Pingyao International Photography Festival
