TOPOPHILIA
BY PETER BRAUNHOLZ
This project is about poetry of space, found in rural regions all over of the European continent. From 2015 to 2018 Peter Braunholz worked in all european countries and traveled from village to village, more than 20,000 miles in total. The displayed images are from Spain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, France, Portugal and Italy.
There are no people in the photographs, yet immanent in all of them is a sense of human presence. As we compare these images, we feel that the series also questions how people live all over Europe, how people from different regions take possession and comprehend spaces differently, and how culture transforms spaces in the way the economic and cultural logic drives our lives.
The work is also related to Arthur Danto´s idea of art as "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace" (Harvard University Press, 1981). Peter Braunholz has chosen common small town spaces away from traffic routes as the motifs for his work. He puts the focus not only on their material, but also on their immaterial quality. Therefore his work serves as an example for Danto’s ideas that art gives obvious things an oddness – it defamiliarises – and artworks have immaterial as well as material constituents.
You will find more images from the series and of Peter Braunholz's work on his website. The series contains 70 selected photographs in total. A greater selection has been published in the monographic book "Photographic Realities" by Kehrer Publishing, Germany.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Peter Braunholz (b. 1963) is a photographic artist based in Frankfurt, Germany. His work has received numerous international awards and has been shown worldwide. Today he focuses on the volatile and often model-like identity of common space.
LINKS
http://www.peterbraunholz.de
https://www.instagram.com/peter.braunholz/