Monograph showcasing 18 years of practice by the Swiss photographer. Alternating snapshots, self-portraits,
documentary and
fashion photography, pictures of arranged
landscapes, buildings, people, and furniture, this publication provides a wide overview of Wassmann's artistic approach through associative sequences weaving on a loose narrative, like a stream of consciousness.
W places the commonplace on an equal footing with what is presumably significant, right in line with Lukas Wassmann's whole approach to photography. The Swiss photographer interleaves intimate snapshots and self-portraits with pictures of arranged nature, buildings and people, home-made furniture, documentary and commercial fashion photography. The Things of Life, as this hodgepodge may suggest, are often played out on the margins. So this book is about an in-between realm, not about Wassmann's money shots.
W brings together photographs from 2000 to 2018. They are not presented in any chronological or thematic order, but the associative pictorial sequences weave one loose narrative after another, only to break off and maybe take up the thread again at some point later on. Characters appear and disappear, chromatic analogies give way to choreographies of form. What remains is not even concrete things, but more atmospheric traces, a pictorial language of memory, moments in the stream of consciousness of an author with a highly idiosyncratic photographic eye.
Lukas Wassmann (born 1980 in Zurich, lives and works in Zurich and Berlin) is a Swiss
photographer, who started his professional career as a carpenter, and later studied photography in Zurich and Berlin. Lukas received grants to study at the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles in 2009, and in 2013 he won the Swiss Federal Design Award, among others. His practice addresses nature and the intimacy of being, looking at individual and social rituals through projects spanning from photography series,
portraits,
sculpture, woodcraft and carpentry.
