STOP! LOOK!

The German photographer Günter Standl sharpens the gaze on those devices that block the view of all tourists: the viewing telescopes. Most likely, the prehistoric people did not know the word "location advantage", but they knew how to use it. They climbed trees to see the enemy early enough, or climbed up a molehill to gain a better overview. With the advent of tourism, the prospect took on a new, more meaningful role, and useful things were invented, such as the vantage point, the observation deck or the observation tower. Modern tourism finally produced the ultimate visual aid: the viewing telescope. In its paid version, the device is called a sober coin-operated telescope, while in English it has been given an almost graceful-sounding name: coin-operated binocular. The principle is simple: money in, free view. Günter Standl, a picture journalist from Germany with a focus on travel and architecture, came up with the idea of photographing these things in the context of their respective landscapes about ten years ago in Bangkok. There, a crowd of people crowded behind the glass wall of a multi-storey shopping centre around a coin-operated telescope to admire the skyline of the city. They could have done better and cheaper without the peep-box. Standl was surprised by this and also by his subsequent observation:"When people were gone, the telescope became a sculpture." Since then he has been photographing coin-operated telescopes as such on his travels around the world. He also loved them because of the enormous variety of their design. Some of them resemble anti-aircraft guns, some look like particularly creepy examples from medical devices, others are reminiscent of a microphone that Billie Holiday could immediately step in front of. One, the one from Castelo de Vide in Portugal, is even homemade. They never fulfil their purpose of showing the observer the best of the landscape, so to speak. They narrow the gaze and punch a hole in the panorama, which would only return two metres to the tourist in all its splendour. Thus the forest becomes a tree trunk, the mountains become boulders, the lake becomes a puddle of water and the sky becomes blue nothingness. Nature does not have to make an effort to be significant,"said the Swiss writer Robert Walser. "It's her." SZ-Magazin - Germany