Andreas Fux
FÄHRTEN
April 24, 2014 – May 4, 2014
widmertheodoridis will present Berlin-based photographer Andreas Fux during its guest show at ‘Photobastei Zürich’. The exhibition ‘Fährten’ (Tracks) presents a cross-section of his 30-year career.
He set off in 1984 for Berlin, East Berlin and in doing so laid down his first tracks. He wandered through streets and courtyards meeting like-minded people, kept his eyes open and photographed. What he captured was not documentarybased, but rather calm, sometimes melancholic images of people living anything but the typical every day GDR life, people in search of another world. ‘Fährten’ not only reveals the tracks taken by Fux, but also explores his encounters in these places – and those people that crossed his path.
People are at the centre of Fux’s search for traces. He photographs them looking directly into his camera. Their physical and emotional scars are features of and tributes to the boundaries they set between themselves and the social mainstream. Their self-made clothes mark them out as inter-world travellers. Each cut in their attire and each piece of pierced skin symbolises a step away from the much-propagated ‘norm’. Fux’s primary interest is not in the act of documenting this subculture – he wishes to discover what is inside these people, what motivates them. What drove them to move from the core of a cosy society to a small, exposed group?
At the beginning of September 2001, Fux travelled across the North Sea on board a Ukrainian training sailboat for his series ‘Horizonte’ (Horizons). Far away from telephone and TV, he celebrated the beauty of the horizon as an interaction between sea, clouds and light. When he returned, the world was a different place, its structures deeply changed by 9/11. Neither Fux nor the horizons had noticed it at the time, but this lack of knowledge enabled the pictures to emanate a calm, eternal beauty. James Baldwin said: “The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.“ The horizon series is contrasted with portraits of men, the look and colour of whose eyes reflect the width and purity of the ocean. An almost romantic, melancholic composition if one was to ignore the scary dimension of real history.
This direct look into the eyes of the people he photographs is Fux’s way of searching for their destiny, and thus for the destiny of us all. What he photographs in Berlin, Moscow or Cuba are reflections on universal processes and paths of life far beyond the naked skin.
People are at the centre of Fux’s search for traces. He photographs them looking directly into his camera. Their physical and emotional scars are features of and tributes to the boundaries they set between themselves and the social mainstream. Their self-made clothes mark them out as inter-world travellers. Each cut in their attire and each piece of pierced skin symbolises a step away from the much-propagated ‘norm’. Fux’s primary interest is not in the act of documenting this subculture – he wishes to discover what is inside these people, what motivates them. What drove them to move from the core of a cosy society to a small, exposed group?
At the beginning of September 2001, Fux travelled across the North Sea on board a Ukrainian training sailboat for his series ‘Horizonte’ (Horizons). Far away from telephone and TV, he celebrated the beauty of the horizon as an interaction between sea, clouds and light. When he returned, the world was a different place, its structures deeply changed by 9/11. Neither Fux nor the horizons had noticed it at the time, but this lack of knowledge enabled the pictures to emanate a calm, eternal beauty. James Baldwin said: “The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.“ The horizon series is contrasted with portraits of men, the look and colour of whose eyes reflect the width and purity of the ocean. An almost romantic, melancholic composition if one was to ignore the scary dimension of real history.
This direct look into the eyes of the people he photographs is Fux’s way of searching for their destiny, and thus for the destiny of us all. What he photographs in Berlin, Moscow or Cuba are reflections on universal processes and paths of life far beyond the naked skin.
