Joachim Brohm: Areal

For roughly a decade, from 1992 to 2002, Joachim Brohm undertook a photographic project of long-term urban observation. At the same location on the outskirts of a German city, he took hundreds of pictures of redevelopment, recording the place as it was transformed from a 1950s commercial/industrial district into a gentrified post-industrial services center and living area. In a meditative response to these changes, Brohm cartographically captured the premises, their buildings and materials, and chronologically documented the developments during this period. Brohm's pictorial idiom--characterized by a dissolved center, with layering and composition referencing the continuation of space beyond the frame's limits--is both documentary and deconstructive. His photographs simultaneously depict and dissolve the outside world, lending the transitory, hovering state of reality and meaning a powerful pictorial form.