Thomas Demand

«I think photography is less about representing than constructing its objects.» In his pictures, Thomas Demand (born 1964 in Munich, lives and works in Berlin) has deconstructed photography as the dominant visual medium of our time. The act of physically building a model of something after a photograph and then re-photographing the re-construction obstructs the link between represented and representation, leaving us uncertain about: should we believe what we see or should we see what we believe? The anonymously empty places in Demand's forever open-ended pictures offer our imagination endless leeway and stimulation for reconstructing the events that have taken or might have taken place in these sceneries of enigmatic ordinariness. In these images, with anonymous piles of paper, Demand recreates the surrealistic scenery of the controversial re-counting of the ballots from the Florida 2000 Presidential election.