Dierk Maass (*1943) focuses in his photographic work on how we experience untouched landscapes. Traveling to remote corners of the earth, from the Himalayas to the Andes, he has also come upon the motifs for his portraits of children. While his landscape pictures display an overwhelming lucidity and sharp contours, the portraits are treated in a soft-focus sfumato mode that lends them an atmosphere of mild reverie. These snapshots of everyday childhood scenes all over the world seem at once strange and ominously familiar. In their melting ambiguity, which withholds every last detail from the viewer and thus denies him a visible present, they give away few clues, do not let themselves be interrogated. In Maass’ photographs blurriness becomes a stylistic device in the watchful confrontation with the unknown.

Authors: Stefanie Dathe
Artists: Dierk Maass

Hardcover
33 x 30 cm
130 pages
60 color ills.
German/English
available
ISBN 978-3-86828-175-0
28 Euro
2010