81jjJONAS JUNGBLUT
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straight from the minibar
the Americas, 2007-2010
My work is intuitive and self-reflective. I have an education and degree in professional photography and have worked in many lighting scenarios. I can sculpt with light. What I have been doing from 2007 to 2010 is exactly that, sculpting with light. Working with an established architecture photographer who specializes in hotels and resorts I have been lighting rooms, kitchens, meeting spaces, hallways, patios, pools and everything in between. All these spaces were lit to perfection. Every light was carefully placed, dimmed, adjusted, flagged and directed to create the most pleasing effect to the eye. The scene was styled to look immaculate and anything that could not be changed to fit in this perfect vision was retouched out or altered on the computer afterwards. I got burned out.
I quickly understood that I had to channel my frustration into energy and then use that energy to create a body of work of my own which would reflect my state of mind and physical environment. From the first trip on I had taken images around the hotels, in the rooms and around the properties. But not until a little later did the urge for creating a more structured body of work surface. I decided to portray our liaisons at the hotel only to quickly become aware of the fact that it was not my time to do so. Timing was an issue as well and I had to abort this series. I then dove deeper into my mind, fueled by even stronger frustration over the unsuccessful attempt. I started to realize how different the images we were creating were from how I was perceiving the hotel during and after working in it. I went back into my archives and looked at images I had taken during these work trips and found images of toilets, dirty plates, clothes laying on the floor, luggage opened but not unpacked and so on. This was it! An intuitive counter movement to the polished images we took all day.
I am a perfectionist and as a perfectionist I know that perfection is an illusion. When one strives for perfection one will sooner or later realize that there is no such state. This is an important realization since it allows for creativity to fully present itself, nothing holding it back. This of course is only true for the perfectionist. A person who is not striving for perfection will accept a given situation as perfect and invest the saved energy of pondering about how to improve the situation into something else. In my case the strive for perfection in imaging a space in a hotel reached a critical point everyday. The point being precisely where the thought of imperfection materialized. Returning to my room I was freed from the illusion of imaging a hotel this way. I was doing the opposite, creating images that depicted the space exactly how I perceived it, encountered it, documenting how I had altered it by living in it.
The photographs in this series are documents of state of mind. They are a window into my world, my perception when traveling. They speak of repetition, boredom, loneliness, excitement and entertainment and they are created out of a strong desire for depicting reality.
The image "a1 steaksauce and onion rings" from this series was selected to be displayed at the Art of Photography show in San Diego in the fall of 2010.
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