With his photographs of a leisure and media culture, Wolfgang Zurborn takes us into an idiosyncratic, whimsical world of images in which scenes and objects of everyday life seem to be out of kilter. After his book Karma Driver (Fotohof edition 2018), in Playtime the artist once again pushes the fragmentation of the image content and tries to break with routine image ideas with radical cutouts, surprising compositions and unusual perspectives. The photographer dedicates his book to the filmmaker Jacques Tati, whom he discovered for himself as early as his student days in the 1980s and whose humorous yet critical view of the everyday world with all its contradictions is a great source of inspiration for him. For Zurborn, one of the essential parallels to Tati’s film Playtime in his pictorial montages is not so much the obvious punch line, but the excerpt-like interplay of different pictorial levels. By taking away the context, condensing it through reflections, window glimpses and juxtapositions, a kind of everyday surrealism emerges. In the accompanying text booklet, Zurborn conducts a conversation with the American photo critic Bill Kouwenhoven.

with Text/fragments & quotes by and about Jacques Tati

Wolfgang Zurborn, *1956 in Ludwighafen, Germany. Lives and works in Cologne, Germany.