German photographer Tom Seelbach is introducing us to his lastest project, ‘Architecture of Wasted Fantasy – The Poetry of Packaging’.
The Magically gleaming towers, respectable skyscrapers, clear construction bodies: with the first brief look we have landed in the model workshop of an architect. However, a more exact check lets the viewer doubt. Our perception is put to the proof and the objects want to be more exactly explored. Questions of the function, the proportion and Verortung become secondary, as soon as one deals with the construction and the raw materials of the photographic sculptures.
The material sometimes shows perfidious tracks, become the frayed edge of a cardboard, the repetition of a punched pattern or the typical plastic surfaces recognizable and refer thus to the source product. The presented things are generated not by digital program achievements, but quite classically analogously the photographer has put the objects in the studio in scene. Here one recognises the experienced product photographer and his artistic potential.
With apparently easy means, simple backgrounds, before to all, however, also by exactly sedate light he creates a space in which the objects present themselves perfect. And now here the play of the imagination begins. From mass products become the individual models which inspire our imagination. The tower from disposable mugs, a high rise from plastic bowls, even a music hall from silver lampions are examples of a test arrangement which lets arise new things from mostly unnoticed packaging and everyday use material.
However, at the end it is not so important maybe at all as really the things are real or how the picture contents and objects are to be named. From surfaces, materials, rooms and stagings originate photographic pictures which entice the viewer, him for a short moment from his reality in a subjective, from the photographer with passion and sensitivity created new reality kidnap. This is the true art of the photographer.
(text by Ulrich Rüter)
