VALENTIN JECK
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
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C.V.
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WORKS
Forest
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pathways to the gods
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
The Swiss photographer, Valentin Jeck, loves telling detailed stories. However, they’re not novels, but “photo stories” that develop in series, circling around each other, establishing themselves within the photographs and building on each other with a great love of subtlety. Therefore, his tool is a large-format camera which, because of bulk and comparatively slow functioning, provides a suitable means of escaping the snapshot and representation of the everyday.
Valentin Jeck’s series are conceptually and precisely planned. His “Wald (Forest)” pictures, for example, originated from his imitation of the paintings of the revolutionary realist, Gustave Courbet, who produced paintings confronting himself with the unromantic and never glorified aspects of nature.
In Another “Story”, Jeck deals with the “Pathways to the Gods”: if someone imagines the constructions of man as strange legacies, how would extraterrestrials view them if one should land on our planet? Or did these extraterrestrials invade long ago, and contribute to these anomalies? With questions like this, full of double meaning and humor, the photographer links, by all means, including more serious musings, what will remain from our contemporary culture in the next century and how future generations will value our relics.
The pictures present a variety of answers, as all good stories should.
Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch
