TOPOPHILIA

This project is about poetry of space, found in rural regions all over of the European continent. Peter worked in all of its countries and traveled from village to village, more than 20,000 miles in total. There are no people in the photographs, yet immanent in all of them is a sense of human presence.

As we compare these images, we feel that the series also questions how people live all over Europe, how people from different regions take possession and comprehend spaces differently, and how culture transforms spaces in the way the economic and cultural logic drives our lives. The series contains 70 selected photographs in total.

Since 2020, the photography series TOPOPHILIA is looked at differently because of the Coronavirus pandemic. It feels like the images are a preview of a world where people stay at home and where streets are empty.

The work is related to Georges Perec´s "The Infra-Ordinary" (L'infra-ordinaire. Seuil, Paris 1989) and to Arthur Danto´s idea of art as "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace" (Harvard University Press, 1981). Peter has chosen common small town spaces away from traffic routes as the motifs for his work. He puts the focus not only on their material, but also on their immaterial quality. Therefore his work serves as an example for Danto’s ideas that art gives obvious things an oddness – it defamiliarises – and artworks have immaterial as well as material constituents.

1ST PRIZE
11TH GALA/POLLUX AWARDS, YORK (UK) 2018

ARCHITECTURE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR
11TH POLLUX AWARDS, YORK (UK) 2018

FINALIST
LENSCULTURE AWARDS, SAN FRANCISCO (US) 2018

HONORABLE MENTION
LUMIERE AWARDS, LOS ANGELES (US) 2018

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Archival pigment prints on
Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Ultra Smooth

HALBE® magnetic frames with passepartout
and SCHOTT Mirogard® museum glass

Print 9.5 x 14 inches | 24 x 36 cm
(Frame 17 x 21 inches | 43 x 53,5 cm)

Other sizes possible for some of the works.
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Exhibited at

Kallmann Museum Schloss Ismaning (D) 2021
Burg Kronberg (D) 2021
Kunst Haus Wien – Museum Hundertwasser (AT) 2019
as part of Foto Wien | European Month of Photography
Kunstverein Germersheim (D) 2018
San Francisco Camerawork (US) 2018
Arles (FR) 2018 (Leica & Lensculture Finalists)
Photography festivals around the world (Lensculture presentation)

Galerie Anja Knoess, Cologne (D)
Galerie Julia Philippi, Heidelberg (D)

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Images from Topophilia have been published in the Monograph Book Photographic Realities by Kehrer Publishing Heidelberg Berlin.

Images from Topophilia have also been published by Scopio Editions in Portugal

© Peter Braunholz 2015-2019