sonic

Architectural photography makes the built environment transportable and thus capable of discourse. The medium of photography has opened up a broad audience for architects. It only serves, shows, explains and comments according to certain rules; it is about transparency, not art. But what happens when architectural photography no longer wants to serve and sees itself as art?

The subject of Antje Hanebeck's photography is converted space. She began with building-like structures, such as harbour cranes with their sculptural appearance, and now devotes herself to the creations of the architectural avant-garde, the buildings of Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Zaha H. Hadid or Daniel Libeskind. Yet Hanebeck in no way intends to create an atlas of much-discussed architecture, but rather engages intensively with the buildings that correspond to her vision, subjecting them to the visual exploration of an artist rather than a documentarian.
In her photography, Antje Hanebeck creates a bridge between architecture as a motif (one of the very early themes of the medium), pictorialist aesthetics (through chemical processing and the often coarse texture and emotionality of the images) and the modern themes of abstraction, reduction and alienation in connection with the most modern buildings.

Antje Hanebeck, *1968 in Braunschweig; lives and works in Munich.