Alisa Feist, (PA of the Director)

Benjamin Jaeger (BOD Camera Work AG) and Lukas Roth

Lukas Roth and Andreas Mühe (Photographers)

Photographer André Rival, and wife. Elisabeth Stangl (ADC)

Zhivago Duncan (artist) and Dr. Judith Plodeck (curator Epicentro art)

© Gallery Camera Work
Article by FORM Special Issue March/April 08* 

One doesn’t always need to travel to Berlin to encounter creativity. The photographer Lukas Roth lives in the mutlicultural neighborhood of Ehrenfeld in Köln with his wife, the russian painter Divna Omaljev and his children. Before settling as a artist and architecture photographer in 1990, he studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie in Arles, southern France.

He divides his photographic work in two main categories, which he defines without pretention: ‚With my classical architecture photography I don’t want to create graphic and aesthetic facade sections, but rather documents of buildings which reveal the real message of architecture.  My artistic works however translate the subjective mood of a place’.

Strong visual and suggestive power binds his work together, but a clear division is important for him: One cannot sell mounted art photographs as documentary photography. His icons are American photographers such as Walker Ewans and the New Topographies—documents of peripheral landscapes.

His own artistic work is often compared with that of Andreas Gursky. Like the latter, Roth photographs architecture, inside and out, that he digitally manipulates and mounts as new detail photos. He doesn’t search for the motives consciously: ‘I stumble upon them. I feel a strong impression in a place and then I plan a photo project.  A photo must be excessive in order to express the atmosphere of the place.

*cut; www.form.de

PHOTOGRAPHS
Works by Lukas Roth are available in different editions.

LUKAS ROTH ONLINE
http://www.lukas-roth.de