Untitled (Academy of Arts, R 209)

Andreas Gefeller

Using the camera as a tool of both truth and deception, Andreas Gefeller produces photographs of urban and manmade spaces that challenge the boundaries of everyday perception. His series have grown increasingly abstract. Among his earliest and most straightforward is “Halbwertszeiten (Half-life)” (1996), for which he traveled throughout the Ukraine, documenting people and places a decade after Chernobyl. By 2000, he was bringing a surreal quality to his images by shooting from exaggerated bird’s- and worm’s-eye perspectives. For his “Supervisions” series (2002-2013), he transformed himself into what he calls a “scanner,” walking inch-by-inch across places like parking lots and golf courses, amassing hundreds of high-resolution photographs of the ground. Gefeller then stitched these images together into a single, large-scale composite, providing a view of the ground beneath his feet so intensely detailed that it appears abstract.