Thomas Wrede
Anywhere
HC, 29 x 24 cm., 132 pp.
Kehrer 2010
"Thomas Wrede?s work is about our relation to nature. Our longing for nature and the medialized description thereof. With his camera he observes how artificial nature is received in the same way as real nature. This subject matter is well known in German philosophy. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel studied the dialectic relation to nature. Wrede thereby continues this German tradition as a photographer, questioning our perception of nature. (...) All of these photographs share the feeling that the viewer could be anywhere. Nowhere does this anonymity of place more secure the viewer?s ability to lose him or herself within the landscape than in Wrede?s images of snow. Although they are completely devoid of human presence, they are not free from the author?s trace. Wrede playfully places fake plastic fir trees amongst an icy windswept landscape seemingly littered with sharp mountainous peaks. What seems at first to be an incredible vantage point reveals itself to be an otherworldly scene of his own construction." (L.Rabaey)