konzeptuelle Fotografie | Koufos Panagiotis | 2011
From the first time I have entered Sudwestbahnhof I felt like I was invited to walk inside a huge living organization where people, machines and cargo were bonded together with a special and very strong bond. Even though I had in mind to focus on the workers and capture their portraits while they were working the outcome was disappointing. All ways it felt like something it was missing.
But suddenly, by entering the huge cargo hall, it became obvious. A strong light was coming from the doors and it was hitting workers and machines from behind transforming both to shapes. This way, it was easily to understood, that in this place machines and workers were almost the same thing. Clearly you could see that machines were the extension of the workers and in the same time workers were the extension of the machines. So it came up, and it felt so natural, that if I wanted to capture the image of the worker –and not the portrait of the man who works there- I had to abstract from both machines and humans the distinctive characteristics that defying their nature and transform them to shapes so to be understood as one unity.
In order to do so I adjusted the focus so to dissolve the outlines and abstract the details, which were making the visual union difficult. In the way, as I was working on this concept the very nature of the method I was using, derived me to organize my outcome in three series of photographs. The first one is the “indoor landscape”, the second one is “indoor-moving shapes” and the third one “color splash”.
vertical plates from left to right: indoor landscape; indoor moving shapes; color splash.
From the first time I have entered Sudwestbahnhof I felt like I was invited to walk inside a huge living organization where people, machines and cargo were bonded together with a special and very strong bond. Even though I had in mind to focus on the workers and capture their portraits while they were working the outcome was disappointing. All ways it felt like something it was missing.
But suddenly, by entering the huge cargo hall, it became obvious. A strong light was coming from the doors and it was hitting workers and machines from behind transforming both to shapes. This way, it was easily to understood, that in this place machines and workers were almost the same thing. Clearly you could see that machines were the extension of the workers and in the same time workers were the extension of the machines. So it came up, and it felt so natural, that if I wanted to capture the image of the worker –and not the portrait of the man who works there- I had to abstract from both machines and humans the distinctive characteristics that defying their nature and transform them to shapes so to be understood as one unity.
In order to do so I adjusted the focus so to dissolve the outlines and abstract the details, which were making the visual union difficult. In the way, as I was working on this concept the very nature of the method I was using, derived me to organize my outcome in three series of photographs. The first one is the “indoor landscape”, the second one is “indoor-moving shapes” and the third one “color splash”.
vertical plates from left to right: indoor landscape; indoor moving shapes; color splash.