Thomas Kellner. Sights

Kellner, who turned away from documentary photography early on, uses contact sheets to create a new visual language: he dissects iconic buildings by capturing them with an analog SLR camera in a series of individual images and then assembling the prints of the contact sheets into a coherent image. Particularly characteristic of this montage technique are the horizontal black stripes between the individual rows of images, which depict the consecutive numbering of the negative. The 35 mm film structures the resulting work, which can consist of up to 2,160 individual images.

Thomas Kellner's artistic work begins long before he presses the shutter release. He meticulously plans and sketches the shot of his motif in a sketchbook. While the creative process involves construction, the end product is more like a deconstruction and is often associated with modern cubism.

Kellner's deconstructed views play with the visual process and detach themselves from the true-to-life representation of photography. It is the fascination for the known in the unknown that invites us to rediscover famous buildings from all over the world, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Colosseum in Rome: piece by piece, one segment after the other is perceived, viewed and assembled into a large whole.