Johann Besse is a Swiss photographer currently living in Berlin. For his 2011 series “Pan” he took several shots of pre-fabricated buildings (Plattenbauten) located in the German capital. He procedeed to decontextualize their lateral facades in order to transform each one of them in a sort of painted object placed against an uniform gray background. While transforming the buildings into an almost abstract sequence, Besse documented the reproduction of a type in a way which echoes Bernd and Hilla Becher‘s work.
On some of the buildings, efforts have been made to avoid the overall austerity by introducing some abstract decorative elements. In Besse’s desaturated images these motifs underline the ambiguity between the tridimensional character of the building and the flat, geometrical composition of the picture.
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All images © Johann Besse
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