Publisher's Description
Frontal encounters – fleeting, unexpected, direct. Photographs of people up
close and immediate. Stefan Enders dissects moments of reality. From this
fleeting encounter a moment of closeness of the most intensive kind is born.
Stefan Enders takes his photographs in streets and squares, in public spaces.
They are not portraits in the classical sense, but snapshots. Using his camera’s
wide-angle lens, Enders comes within centimeters of situations and moments of
everyday life. Again and again, his photographs become, as it were, an intuitive
means for cutting out a »breath« of reality. The results are unusual portraits of
people in movement, often in panorama format, in hard black and white.
Stefan Enders’ large-format pictures are uncommon and uncustomary. They are
both expression and documentation of a situation, and yet they point beyond
this, confronting us with questions about life and our own human existence.
Although originating from different countries and different culture areas, the
works are a coherent, comprehensive cycle describing the photographer’s way of
looking at the world and his search for it.
Enders studied painting at the art academies in Mainz and Düsseldorf, before his
focus began to shift more and more to photography.
»It was this great closeness to reality that fascinated me. I was no longer able to
freely invent my subjects the way painters or sculptors do. I was tied to what was
happening in front of my camera. I had to come to terms with reality much more
directly – to expose myself to reality in order to get the pictures I was looking
for. That’s what always makes it so difficult even today – but that is exactly what
makes this medium so fascinating.«
Along with his own projects, he has spent many years working for magazines and
journals in the field of photo-reportage and portraits. His works have been
published in magazines like Stern, Geo, Zeit, Spiegel, Focus, Merian etc. In 2005
he was appointed Professor of Photography at the University of Applied
Sciences, Mainz. Stefan Enders lives in Cologne and Mainz.