MARKUS WIMMER
Within my studies of communication design, I became strongly involved in various aspects of commercial advertising. The pictorial language in this sector was revolutionized over the last years by digital media and resulted, in particular because of constantly improving retouching techniques, in more and more extreme excesses. Humans become thinner, smoother and flawless, while occaisonly being optimized to unrecognizable anatomic perfection. Items appear cleaner, supernatural, thereby almost loosing their natural identity. An element of volatility and lie is a common thread in all this work, which aims to sell the customer or spectator a true image that often remains unquestioned.
In the photo series „nature morte“ I have picked up the theme of lie and attempted to use it for creating a certain balance to the usual pictorial language of advertising. Consequently, I use in my still lifes crumbs, dust, rotten fruits, drought and fading flowers, dead animals and objects that do not necessarily correspond to the Zeitgeist, without loosing asthetic values in displaying them.
The lie is manifested in each of my works by incorporating disembodied body parts – in my view a current and actual metaphor of mortality. In earlier so called vanitas-still lifes, mortality was pictured for instance by skulls and spilled cups. In times of barbarization of mankind, in which skulls have emerged into fashion accesiors of a whole generation, I was searching for a new symbol, which I identified in the virtual abscission of body parts. In this, shredded cuts should not be viewed as glorification of violence but more to add toughness and rigidity to asthetic appearing still lifes, which is needed to reflect elements of our present society.
Technially, all photographs were not made by a single exposure but by combining 5-30 single shots of a small format camera, which were taken from a tripod. The technical recombination in Photoshop by the so called stitch technique resulted in a large-format picture, which is creating a certain but necessary element of fragilty.
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