american_scans (project for 2018 !)

american_scans Photographic road trip through the USA July - September 2018 After a series of fascinating sessions in India (Delhi and Sunderpur), China (Beijing), Luxembourg (Clervaux), Italy (Venice), Germany (Darmstadt and Gelsenkirchen) and Austria (Vienna, Spitz and Moosburg), the »people_scans« project is now set to go stateside with a journey across the USA. american_scans Kurt Hoerbst and his team will be setting out from New York in their mobile photo studio and heading east. Alexandra Grill will have the dual role of assisting the project and documenting the photographic journey with her own words and pictures. People who encounter the »scan truck« on its epic drive will be offered the chance to become part of this pioneering series. The aim is to create a truly heterogeneous picture of American society – from international film stars, musicians and politicians to students and everyday workers. Indigenous groups and representatives of different religions will also feature in the project, along with business people, figures of public interest and the socially disadvantaged. The final presentation (comprising of a book and an exhibition) will also reflect this concept, as the finished portraits will all be displa yed without any form of categorization. Borders, structures and hierarchies are deliberately dissolved to present a truly representative image of society, in line with the democratic approach that runs throughout this initiative. american_scans To Europeans, America is somehow simultaneously fascinating and confusing. Much of what happens in the United States is regarded in Europe with both admiration and bewilderment - especially following the election of Donald Trump as president. America was once regarded as the land of unlimited possibilities for people from European, Asia and Latin American – to what extent is this still the case in the new millennium? Kurt Hoerbst is set to take his mobile portrait studio to America in 2018, continuing the long-term people_scans project and searching for answers to this intriguing question. Unlike the pr evious visits, these sessions will no longer just be based in one place, but w ill take place along a route that stretches right across the USA. The journey, which will last around three months, will use the scans of the various individuals to highlight the diversity and the s imilarities, the opposites and ultimately the inconceivability of this vast country. The Americans This project from Kurt Hoerbst is based on a 180-year tradition of traveling photographers – intrepid individuals who spent years focusing on the most crucial aspect of any cultural landscape: the people. Hoerbst‘s work is the kind of photographic search for socio-cultural clues that inspired other photographers to »trek« far and wide across the continent. Hoerbst follows in the photographic footsteps of Robert Frank, a European who set out to document »THE AMERICANS« in the 1950s, or of Richard Avedon, who in 1985 published the book »IN THE AMERICAN WEST« as a photographic tribute to the working class. Photographers such as Mathew B. Brady and Alexander Gardner visited the major sites of the American Civil War in the 19th century, using their mobile studios as »analog carriages« to capture the realities of the conflict. In much the same way, Kurt Hoerbst will now be setting out in his »digital carriage«.