Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand: Nationalgalerie
Publisher's Description
Thomas Demand provokes confrontations
between photography’s poles of fact and fiction.
True-to-size paper models are photographed
and then scaled down, while traces of event and
person are systematically removed, leaving
phantom images of the proposed “crime scene”
that seem at once familiar and dreamlike.
Demand’s 2009 Nationalgalerie (Berlin) exhibition
and catalogue bring together his work on
German history since 1945—a scrutiny of the
“Deutschlandbild,” the “German image.”These
reflections, reconstructed in photographs from
a variety of scenarios in the postwar period,
encourage the viewer to consider the complexity
of the photographic document. Demand’s
representations of the social and historical are
introduced not as monoliths but as places of
multiple possibility, halls of mirrors in which
the viewer is forced to confront—rather than
be fed—potential distortions. His concern for
the pliability of human memory and the play
between the central and peripheral image
contributes to the vibrancy of his art. For
Demand, the photographer’s accomplishment
lies in “re-privatisating that which is constructed
as a public opinion.”
ISBN: 3865219411
Publisher: SteidlMACK
Hardcover : 226 pages
Language: English
Dimensions: 11.8 x 11.3 x 1.2 inches
Buy on Amazon
Publisher: SteidlMACK
Hardcover : 226 pages
Language: English
Dimensions: 11.8 x 11.3 x 1.2 inches