Art Blog: Andreas Gefeller

The other day fellow classmate Griffin recommended an artist for me to look at, saying that his work was similar to my own. After some simple research, I immediately saw the similarities between our style and concept. Gefeller is another German photographer (I'm starting to see a trend here) who follows the deadpan, cold German ascetic but adds a very unique twist to it. When you first look at his photos, they appear to be shots from a helicopter. However, they appera too undistorted, composed, and perfect to be helicopter shots.



Gefeller accomplishes these amazing photos in a surprisingly simple way. "Just like a scanner, which works across lines on a piece of paper, I walk across a certain area line by line, and with each step I take a photo. I carry my camera, which is pointed towards the ground, in such a way that my own feet don't end up in the images." I find his process to be very intriguing because it's unique and makes me reevaluate my own way of working.

His images show great amounts of control. While he is not altering the landscape itself, he is deciding how much of it we will actually see. They are disorienting because we are not used to being able to see this much detail from a seemingly distanced top-down view. Work that causes me to question the photographers process engages me in and makes it more likely for me to stick around and think about what it is actually trying to say. I know that might make me sound shallow but for the amount of images that I see daily, especially art images, I seem to need something that is truly unique in order to really keep my attention and make me want to study it further.

Gefeller's work has been a huge motivator for. Lately I've been in the 'it's all been done mode' but seeing his work is a real breath of fresh air. I have been looking for new processes to make my work more exciting and seeing what he does forces me to think outside the box. Gefeller is able to present the world from a different angle, an alternate view on an over photographed, over documented planet. The idea of originality is something that I struggle with constantly when trying out new work. I get upset when when I find that someone else is working in the same strain as myself. But I need to not see it as that, I have to learn to feed off of it and push myself to do better rather then shutting down a possibility. I work in the same field as Gefeller and a lot of my ideas are similar to his, and now I am able to let that inspire me instead of frustrate me. So thank you Griffin for the suggestion, and for getting the gears turnin once!