An unrealness lies in the strange beauty of these images, which also arouses a melancholic atmosphere. “Ecken” is strongly related to Arthur Danto’s idea of art as “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace” (Harvard University Press, 1981). Peter chose common corner spaces as the motifs for his work and strongly focuses not on their material, but on their immaterial quality. Therefore his work serves as an example for Danto´s ideas that art makes obvious things odd, art defamiliarizes and artworks have immaterial as well as material constituents.
Peter creates different, unique styles for his photographs, depending on the nature of objects and spaces, and he also chooses the formats for his images carefully. For the series “Ecken” he choosed the square as the only format for all images. The square format has a long tradition in art, and in photographic art as well. The analogue 6×6 format was used by many famous photographers: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Vivian Mayer loved using it, just to name a few. As we generally see the world in a landscape format, a square-crop supports a surreal visual language. Peter does not use the square to produce a centered composition, but to support the unreal atmosphere of the images. With the right-angled windows, corner-lines and additional geometric elements in his square images, Peter produced strong frame-in-frame compositions, which seem perfectly balanced. Another aspect of “Ecken” is the special color and light ambience: Peter took these photographs on cold winter mornings with overcast skies. The absence of shadows and the smooth colors add an element of quietness and sobriety.
About the author:
Peter Braunholz was born in 1963. He lives as photographic artist in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied Music at the M.I.T. in Los Angeles and Film at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Before he turned to photographic art in 1999 he worked as an industrial photographer. In 2013 he was scholar of Huantie Times Art Museum in Beijing including lecture at Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang. The artbook publisher Kehrer Verlag will release a monographic book titled “Photographic Realities” about his work in spring 2017.
