Surplus

During the work on the series „Surplus“, many people asked me if you really can compare War with our western consumer society. But it never was my intention to compare. War is a term that people from my generation understand, and we connect it to suffering, death, crime and mainly to violence. But just a few people, after World War 2, in the western world have experienced war. Our knowledge of war is based on Information from different news agencies. Also In our western world a war is going on. A war of Trademarks, brands and conglomerates in other words a war of consumerism. The Victims of that war are the consumers. Artificial consumer needs are made to create constantly buying Consumers. The Consumer falls into a dependency with his income to buy things he really doesn’t need. It is hard to ignore and resist the psychological manipulation. In a neo-liberalistic elbow society everybody is in competition with each other.Life is a walk on a thin red line between „Lifestyle“ and success orientation. I used photographic war icons to visualize these circumstances of the modern western Lifestyle. By not showing but only referring to iconic images one becomes aware of how powerful pictures are that already “made history”, but have become part of our visual culture.