Ornament & Découpage. 2019

The present pictorial work transfers the principle of découpage to architectural photography - to the photographic material. The starting point is historical architectural and landscape photographs from picture archives, which were subsequently overlaid and decorated with other photographic Objets Trouvés. Be it that the smallest image areas have been multiplied and added to repeating patterns, or that other ornamental image fragments have been taken from arts and crafts catalogs and inserted seamlessly.

The ornamental-like, pictorial figures thus created have only little in common with the original pictures, even less so with the photographic reality. Architectures are depicted that have never actually existed in this view and form - pure fiction, more akin to a photographic-seeming drawing and far removed from the claims of documentation and authenticity that historical black and white photographs tend to be associated with. They are hybrid architectural image constructs, detached from the history of architecture and photography, and can hardly be assigned to any particular function, typology or specific location. They thus fundamentally question the representation of architecture as a photographic image – as a piece of evidence and blur the borders between fact and fiction - an ever increasing characteristic of our times.