Los Angeles is the setting for Hans-Christian Schink’s latest group of works, created during a Villa Aurora fellowship in 2002 and during visits the following year. Starting with an extremely precise investigation of the no-man’s-land on the periphery of the megalopolis, which he bathes in a glistening light, Schink, in contrast, generates extreme cropped enlargements from nocturnal panoramic shots that only hint at traces of urban spaces of action. In this extreme overcoming of distance and the associated reduction of photographic authenticity, he succeeds in creating pictorial solutions that in their abstraction are more reminiscent of painting than photography…
In his text accompanying the book, art historian Kai-Uwe Schierz rightly places Hans-Christian Schink’s work in the tradition of early Romantic landscape depiction when he argues “… that the Romantic motif of strangeness or lost distance (and, suspended therein, of longing) is just as present in the night pictures as in the previously known pictures of the day.”