Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]

 Working with existing pictures, like I do, you constantly think about the flood of images we are subjected to and you want to figure out how you can make sense of it. 
 [With my photographs] you have a [single, forever fixed] moment and my particular angle of vision. My tyrannical condition, as it were, is that I prescribe your vision. 
 My work is in itself a ghost of my vision. 
 I have the impression that photography can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead. 
 What is decisive are the blurred traces left in the media by [the] incidents [they relay]. 
 [Once the photograph is taken], the sculpture is no longer that important, but nor is the photograph.... I have never thought in terms of my work culminating in pure photography. 
 Artists work the with the material given by the media as much as with real experience because that material is superimposed on reality and configures the tools we use to make our way through the world. 
 The production of models is at the core of a complex process.... The surroundings I portray are for me something untouched, a utopic construction. No traces are visible on their surfaces, and time seems to have come to a stop. From this arises a paradoxical state of indeterminacy, which of course in one sense opposes the idea of momentariness (so important to the beginnings of photography) but also opposes the true nature of sculpture. 
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