Deutsch
English
Background information
For the now long out-of-print photo book 'Behind the Block' (Institut für Buchkunst Leipzig, 2004), Tobias ZIELONY visited the peripheries of modern cities such as Halle, Marseille and Bristol to explore the youth culture there in 'subcultural melting pots' and special zones of urban civilization at eye level.
Content
The photo book 'Behind the Block' by Tobias ZIELONY contains a series of color documentary photographs created in a cinematic aesthetic that portray the protagonists of the youth gangs and show the urban environment and meeting places of the young people. As individual images and as a sequence, the shots are quite ambiguously formulated; the photographer deliberately dispenses with a narrative film dramaturgy or symbolic statement, but instead spreads out a collage of visual impressions of the urban 'crime scenes' in front of the viewer. This pictorial and formal language must be called mapping, which invites the viewer to develop an individual narrative, his own context for the images. With this strategy, he takes up the aesthetics of the youth scene: the photo series, motifs and image details are reminiscent of music videos, snapshots or journalistic reports. (Text based on a contribution by Anna Reichert, © Marion Ermer Stiftung, 2004)