Jesper Rasmussen: ‘Off Location’
This work consists of a series of photographs that represent buildings and recognizable locations in the public space. The buildings at first appear familiar, but at the same time there is something alienating and uncanny about these pictures. They have all been digitally retouched, so that all traces of human presence and activity have been removed. Cars, bicycles, traffic lights, graffiti, doors, windows and so on, are missing, making the architecture seem out of scale and alien, like a parallel reality. This is without adding any information that was not there to begin with. All that has occurred is a reduction of information, along with a removal of various pictorial elements. Each picture has been composed of several digital photographs in order to achieve a resolution high enough to make the retouching credible.
The photographs play the part of classical, documentary pictures that unpretentiously show only what has been placed in front of the camera. However, The photograph has thus been decontextualized. Instead of referring unmistakably to a specific place, a particular locality (as is normally the nature of photography), it slides toward an image of pure form and (architectonic) plan.
The retouching contributes to the disquieting effect of the images. The familiar, the recognizable, hides within it something inhuman, uncanny, reducing our ordinary, trivial, everyday spaces to an uninhabited, set-piece universe that shows a deceptive resemblance to reality.
© All copyright Jesper Rasmussen