Ralf Peters - Photographer - Bernhard Knaus Fine Art : B. Knaus Fine Art

Ralf Peters

Ralf Peters stages in his conceptual photography the character of everyday objects and locations, presenting them and their impressions in a new light. Reduced to their essentials, subjects such as bridges, petrol stations and landscapes are abstracted to the essence of their colour and form, appearing to dissolve into pixels. Peters challenges viewers to question what they see by blurring the line between photomontage and documentary photography. In doing so, he criticises the image aesthetics of consumer culture and the artificial world presented through digital image processing, which skews the human understanding of "reality".

The artist approaches his motifs conceptually; observation and documentation of moments are the starting points for his artistic practice. Peters studies and documents places and objects over long periods of time, carefully analyzing their details. He then assembles the various snapshots he's collected using a freely structured post-processing technique, changing and reshaping their structure. His image montages are created similarly to the manner in which a sculptor assembles materials into dimensional form, or how a painter might explore variant colours combining.

The artist's desire to depict the real, the human, the natural and urban, is recorded throughout the history of art and photography. Through the development of digital photography as a mass medium, the question of authenticity in presentation of the real has often been addressed playfully. In this respect, digital image-making rooting in abstraction and formal variation based a major current in the early history of digital photography of the late 1960s and 1970s. Early experiments such as those by Nancy Burson or Charles Csuri documented the characteristic features of the medium expressed through repetition and variation, and turned away from the idea of the original.

Ralf Peter's methodology is also located here. Subjects are transformed and abstracted until they become unrecognisable ciphers of their original form, and as Hito Steyerl also attests in contemporary photography, shakes up the perception of the real.

Ralf Peters studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, the École des Beaux Arts in Nîmes and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich. At the beginning of his professional career he used the traditional media of painting and sculpture, before dedicating himself to photography and digital photomontage since the late 1990s. Ralf Peters lives and works in Hamburg. More

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