Swiss artist Philipp Schaerer creates images which aim to reflect a built exaggerated reality, using digital editing techniques in order to obtain a result which is nearly impossible to distinguish from a photograph.
The Bildbauten series, whose making process you can discover here (and on the last image at the end of this post), is a taxonomy of abstract, monolithic buildings. Much like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Schaerer strictly uniforms lighting, angle, distance and focus, to alienate the image from the subjectivity of the photographer and pursue an “objective” character, but the total artificiality of the creations subtly negates these principles and try to reformulate the question of the differentiation between reality and image.
Order the book here.
From the description:
“The series of images with the title „Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality.
Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing.”
Related: Imaginary buildings by Filip Dujardin, already on Socks
Via: But does it float?
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