Talent of the Year 2020 - NOMINEE: janusz beck

The series Periphery deals with the description of an ordinary, man-altered lanscape. It represents a photographic discussion about orders and conditions by social and ethnological traces, which comes to an exploration of humans and its surroundings, of humans and nature in the photograph. The series works with a wider definition of landscape, which includes socio-cultural and economic contexts and the divers interaction between mankind and nature in the landscape. Through the description of unspectacular, man-altered landscape, ordinary life takes shape here under its own conditions and allows it to be expressed in all its regrettable ordinariness. The series collects banal motifs that are so omnipresent that they are often no longer consciously perceived. It directs the eye to ordinary and everyday manifestations of a suburban and profane environment. In this way, this work captures a brittle, often melancholic beauty of the banal and the ordinary. The series Peripherie represents a topographical examination of man-made, built land. The collection and fixation of ordanary situations, banal objects, inconspicuous landscapes or faceless places, open up traces of human life which are normally not considered worthy of being depicted. By collecting the unspectacular, the structures and sensitive connections of our culture are displayed and the act of photographing becomes an experiment to make sure the own environment. Even there are no people shown in the pictures of the series Peripherie, it does provide information about the structures of a society and how it shapes their living space. The photographs in the series Peripherie are based on a documentary style of photography that attempts to keep any judgements or opinions out of the work. Certainly, the images can be analyzed and located, but this process does not lead to a final judgment. The photographer is satisfied with the role of the observer. The shown subjects are a generally valid description of a suburban, rural landscape, which can be located in Northern Germany or Central Europe, but does not claim to be completed or have an exact localization. The series shows the marks of the humans in the landscape. On this way Peripherie becomes a pictorial exploration of rural areas, directs the viewer's gaze to ordinary and everyday manifestations of this landscape and becomes a representation of complex territorial contexts. The pictured places and objects are placed in a relationship by the use of the serial sequences, which underlines the unspectacular nature of the landscape and creates a general view of a cultural landscape. Through this combination of the depiction of the unspectacular, the serial underlining of it and the intention of the photographs as a pure description, the series Peripherie creates a structure that can be described as a "laconic photograph of a laconic area".

About author:
Janusz Beck, born in 1983, was trained as a Photographer at the photoarchive Fotomarburg. He studied Photography at the Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts and at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in the class of Prof. Vincent Kohlbecher, Prof. Ute Mahler and Prof. Linn Schröder where he graduated with Master of Arts in Photography in 2019.
His photographic focus is on documenting man-altered landscape, as well as (sub-)urban, political and social relationships. He places his work in the traditional context of the New Topographic Movement and the New Color Photography. Janusz Beck lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.