STATEMENT -

„no filter“ 2023

Maxi Pfeil

I always liked to witness a beautiful sunset and enjoy the moment before the light disappears below the horizon. However I never understood, that it is so important to some people, that they feel the need to photograph this spectacle and try to possess it.

Ironically an impossible task, as a sunset does not translate to a camera or smartphone in its fullest (sun v RGB/peripheral vision v Retina display/smell/feeling). So what is it, that’s sets free this urge to capture a daily reoccurring phenomenon so much, that alone on instagram, more than 320 million versions of it exist?

It feels like humanity has declared an unspoken photography competition of who has captured the best sunset. Interestingly rarely to revisit this memory of a place, time and circumstances, but more as a holiday flex, a luxurious life in which I as the human am able to hold nature in my pocket or share it online.

Out of images that are just seemingly beautiful and may be considered meaningless, I want to create something visually interesting as well as mentally stimulating. For this series I have stolen photos of sunsets from celebrities’ instagram accounts and continuously merged two images from two different personalties with each other. If a sunset is beautiful, two printed on top on top of each other must be magnificent!

I chose celebrities because of the exacerbated relation and role instagram and images have for their persona. They exits through images, the ones they give off themselves, the ones surrounding them and how they benefit from them. Through this they share privacy and glamour to give the public a glimpse into their lives. With this work I want to dismantle this utopia and steel their glamour.

Strangely what we are seeing is an alienated world, depicting a reality we do not know or in some cases believe to be physically possible. A bizarre planet earth where weather conditions and relating fires, floods, earthquakes, winters as well as summers are becoming increasingly harsh. I cannot stop thinking that these anomalies, in the images could be future results of humans misbalancing our planet even more and destroying it until it becomes uninhabitable. There is undoubtedly, an apocalyptic feeling in this work.

Ironic how two beautiful images, from this frightening notion, when overlapped! – The same way that mathematically minus and minus equal plus. However in this case plus and plus equal minus. Creating a series of images that take away the ephemeral beauty of our planet and talk about this artificial way, of seeing the world through images.