Introduction
Images of urban areas that reveal views of public places and their surfaces, as well as offering insights into closed areas from a bird’s-eye perspective, form the basis of the “Supervisions” work from the Düsseldorfer Photographer Andreas Gefeller.
With help of an arduous photographic technique, Gefeller manages these "possible" and "impossible" view-points. Hundreds of individual shots are digitally re-joined, resulting in the impression that the overall picture has originated from a much higher perspective.The detail-richness which results from the high-resolution process of the "scanned" surfaces and optical breaks between segments that originate through perspective shifts, betray the uncommon formation process, although this realization is only apparent to the observer through closer inspection. Consequently, like with his previous and often awarded photo work “Soma”—which portrays night-light images of deserted holiday tourist centers—Gefeller leads us into a tension-field between reality and fiction, making views visible that are not possible to see by eye, without manipulating the reality of the scene itself.
In Supervisions, Gefeller reads the tracks that the society leaves behind and awakens curiosity within the observer about the utilization and history of the portrayed urban "habitats". Further viewer associations to espionage-satellite imagery and the consequential realization over the restrictions of one’s own private realm provides the title Supervisions with additional depth. Gefeller not only exhibits over-view perspectives, he also points contextually to how modern Man is overseen and supervised.