nominated: Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2012

In his latest groups of works, Les Acteurs, Vorbilder and Die Redner, Berlin artist Michael Schäfer uses computer-aided photo montage as a content-based image strategy aimed at addressing issues of representation as a social and political habitus. In Les Acteurs pupils at a German elite boarding school were asked to put on a business outfit. Caught in the field of tension of photographic staging and self-portrayal, they pre-empt a class role into which they will inevitably grow. Vorbilder is based on the restaging of press photos featuring politicians and business people, protagonists who find themselves in the public media yet somehow appear isolated and alone with their tensions and disputes. By contrast, Die Redner explicitly addresses the image genre of the speaker’s portrait – except that here the casting appears inappropriate. The book departs from the safe ground of merely depicting the individual works. Instead, Schäfer uses a complex meshwork of excerpts to zoom into his world of imagery, thereby giving the book its autonomous structure and contents.

Michael Schäfer, *1964 in Sigmaringen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.