Monday, March 05, 2007

Worlds in minature


(Olivo Barbieri)

Worlds in miniature - well, some of them are and some of them aren't - and okay, some of them are actually life size.

That said, I've always been drawn by photographers who play with this aspect of photographic "reality". Making pictures of existing places look like they are miniature models and unreal in some way. Or photographers who make miniature worlds and make them look almost like they are real places. Or even those - like Thomas Demand - who make life sized "reality" out of paper and cardboard and photograph it. And in a way, this follows on somewhat from the whole Jeff Wall thing.



(Thomas Demand)

It's not a major preoccupation. Nor is it something I really want to do myself (and too much of it gets to be a little - well, too much). But I'm rather glad there are photographers out there, doing this, playing with the boundaries of what a "real" photograph and a "real" place is.


So here are a few

(Naoki Honjo)




(Toni Hafkenscheid)



(Marc Räder)

3 comments:

Denizen said...

Tim, on this particular field are you familiar with the work of Ken Botto? This guy been around for a while, yet he's hardly ever mentioned the way he should be, IMO.

Anonymous said...

If everything was done perfectly, then the photograph of the miniature would be indistinguishable from the photograph of the real thing, right ?

But then, doesn't the whole enterprise become a purely intellectual exercise if there is no visual difference ?

tim atherton said...

but the thing is, while some of the miniature ones are done so perfectly you end up thinking they are real. And yet some of the real ones don't quite look perfect (or, in fact look too perfect) and end up looking like models.

I downloaded a whole pile of files from a bunch of these different photographers into one folder and, looking through them to pick out the ones for this post, I found I couldn't actually tell sometimes which was which, not because of the perfections, but because of the imperfections.

There is still one that I was oconviced was a model but it was actually "real"