From May 4 through June 29, Laurence Miller Gallery will feature a series of 12 large-scale color photographs by the German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski from his groundbreaking series and book Heimat. Derived from the German word for “homeland,” this body of work seems a marked departure from the hyper-intense, hyper-electric series of fast-growing Asian cities that preceded it, Neon Tigers. Closer consideration, however, alludes to a certain type of post-modern romanticism that characterizes them both.

The impetus for Bialobrzeski’s series of landscapes set in the German countryside was an appointment to a position in Bremen at an art college, for it meant that a minimum of eight months
a year would be spent in Germany. At about the same time, Peter realized that the “new” German style in photography, characterized by the dialectic in the work of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, did not speak to his own sense of significance, his own aesthetic. Bialobrzeski’s pictures are in direct contradistinction to this movement:  whereas the New German Photography was to be documentary, objective and devoid of emotion, Bialobrzeski sought an aesthetic of beauty that approached the sublime. His pictures owe more to the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich than to the New German Photography of the Bechers and their students.

The landscapes that Peter Bialobrzeski photographs are ordinary – places where people go to seek quiet or recreation or fun—to hike, or swim, or ski. But the pictures he makes are extraordinary, and though they are populated by many folks, the overall impression is of a grand and harmonious landscape filled with memory and meaning. And they are beautiful---in this sense a glorious contradiction to the cool, hip, detached aesthetic which they parallel.

Peter Bialobrzeski was born in Wolfsburg in 1961, and has worked for several years as a freelance photographer for various international publications. Heimat marks his second solo exhibition at the Laurence Miller Gallery.

Heimat 11
Fischbeker Heide, 2004