Thomas Demand.
Thomas Demand recreates scenes out of cardboard and then photographs them, he begins with an image usually a photograph taken from the media which he then transforms into a life size model using only cardboard to create the scene. Demand will create these cardboard scenes within a studio situation to ensure that when it is ready to photograph he can set up his lights around the scene. He thrives to create the scene perfectly so measures all the dimensions identically to ensure that his photograph is almost identical to the media based image, although sometimes it is clear that they have been constructed, pencil marks or edges that have not joined perfectly can be visible. This helps in a way to remind the viewer that this is a staged tableaux image which I feel is Demand’s purpose. Demand then captures the scenes on a large format camera using a telescopic lens, by using a large format camera allows Demand to capture the maximum amount of detail possible which is essential as Demand spent long periods of time creating these scenes he wants to ensure that all the detail is visible within the image. Demand’s photographs are displayed within galleries but have also been published in many books, when the images are exhibited they are enlarged and laminated behind Plexiglas, I feel these images gain more by being enlarged, as I mentioned earlier Demand uses a large format camera which is perfect for enlarging images. Also it gives the images a sense of reality, if they are printed up to life size the viewers will feel like they can walk into the image; that it is actually there.
Thomas Demand recreates scenes out of cardboard and then photographs them, he begins with an image usually a photograph taken from the media which he then transforms into a life size model using only cardboard to create the scene. Demand will create these cardboard scenes within a studio situation to ensure that when it is ready to photograph he can set up his lights around the scene. He thrives to create the scene perfectly so measures all the dimensions identically to ensure that his photograph is almost identical to the media based image, although sometimes it is clear that they have been constructed, pencil marks or edges that have not joined perfectly can be visible. This helps in a way to remind the viewer that this is a staged tableaux image which I feel is Demand’s purpose. Demand then captures the scenes on a large format camera using a telescopic lens, by using a large format camera allows Demand to capture the maximum amount of detail possible which is essential as Demand spent long periods of time creating these scenes he wants to ensure that all the detail is visible within the image. Demand’s photographs are displayed within galleries but have also been published in many books, when the images are exhibited they are enlarged and laminated behind Plexiglas, I feel these images gain more by being enlarged, as I mentioned earlier Demand uses a large format camera which is perfect for enlarging images. Also it gives the images a sense of reality, if they are printed up to life size the viewers will feel like they can walk into the image; that it is actually there.
The images that Demand creates as I mentioned earlier are taken from the media and a lot of the time his images are making references to significant events in German history, I only know this from reading up about Demand’s work, you could not tell this from just looking at his photographs. As Demand re constructs his images out of cardboard this directly removes his own images from the ones he is reconstructing, both images hold completely different meanings, for example take this image for example.
Room (Raum) 1994.
To a normal viewer this would just look like a room that has been trashed, and Demand offers us little more detail than that. But having done some research into it this is actually a reconstruction of Fuhrerhauptquartier (Adolf Hitler’s headquarters) after it was bombed in July 1944. Once we know what this image is really about it changes the way that we look and feel about it, it now has narrative. I feel that this is the reason as to why Demand does not tell you much about the images he uses to create his photographs, he wants the viewers to look at his images with a clear and open mind instead of already having an idea to what the image is about before really looking at it. By recreating the image out of cardboard for us he is directly creating a distance between us and the event the image is depicting, obviously there is already a distance between us and events as there is only so much the media tell us about certain events happening, but Demand’s images create a bigger distance and almost remove us from the event all together.
As individual photographs some people may find them boring, there are never any people in Demand’s images and they are usually very still and cold. When you put all his images together they flow rather well, we can clearly see Demand’s style coming through. When looking through his book I find myself trying to spot the cardboard and see areas that Demand has missed etc and look at his images in a very different way. I almost find them humorous; they remind me of Childs play as if these sets have been created for children, which is the complete opposite of how I looked at his ‘Room’ image after reading more about the history behind it. His images tell a dark story but this is not clear from just looking at them once.
Demand deals with a lot of simulations; every image he creates is a simulation of the image he sourced it from. A simulacrum is a representation that is not necessarily tied to an object in the real world, in Demand’s case his images are simulacrum as they are representations of an event that happened in the real world. Although the fact that Demand copies from an image taken of an event makes the relationship between Demand’s image and the event less significant, and therefore his image is more cut off from the event it represents and this threatens the relationship of reference between sign and object.
