A Mythic Obsession
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Text in English & German. Photographs of a huge building site, taken by night, show a bewildering world of machines, boards, cables and scaffolding, seemingly in total chaos and with mud and puddles everywhere. The viewer's gaze enters dim underworlds that look like a modern equivalent of Piranesi's Carceri. Behind clearly structured, transparent façades we can see office workers, politicians, hotel guests and laboratory staff. We can see what they are doing and how they interact with one another. Both everyday work and private business are on public display. The figures' various social roles are revealed by their body language, clothing and attributes. In contrast to the kind of voyeuristic view through a window we see in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film Rear Window (1954), the glass façade freely reveals what the classic perforated façade hides. Like the propaganda images turned out by totalitarian systems, the vastness of advertising spaces turns our usual sense of proportions on its head. Monumentally large, usually female human figures dwarf houses and people. They look down on the city's inhabitants from above. No passerby can evade their gaze or their attractions. Taken together, the photographs in this book represent a visual commentary on our present day lifestyle. All the pictures were taken in the centre of Berlin -- but the same scenes can be seen all over the world. The buildings are just as interchangeable as the monumental images of sex and consumerism. Stefan Koppelkamm's photographs are accompanied by selected monologues from Roland Schimmelpfennig's drama Push Up 1--3, which give the "ideal inhabitants" of this world a voice. These are people who fully subscribe to the images of success and beauty taken from adverts and from the media.
Stefan Koppelkamm studied at the Gesamthochschule in Kassel, and after a longer stay in the USA he now lives in Berlin and teaches communication design at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Since the publication of his book Gewächshäuser und Wintergärten im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1981), he has repeatedly engaged with historic and current aspects of architecture.
- ISBN-13
- 9783936681413
- Publisher
- Edition Axel Menges
- Imprint
- Edition Axel Menges (D)
- Publication date
- 13 July 2011
- Format
- Hardback
- Pages
- 96
- Dimensions
- 235 x 330 mm
- Illustrations
- 50 photos
- Language
- German
