The particular challenge for Thorsten Klapsch is creating foreign worlds in a corner of Frankfurt am Main, to arrange Hong Kong, or to virtually replace real existing buildings with others. At the age of twelve he bought his first camera and set out on a goal-oriented path. After classical photography training at the richly traditional Berlin Letter-Verein, he worked for magazines (e.g. a report about the then completely furnished Palast der Republik [Palace of the Republic] for the Zeitmagazin), in the advertising and music fields for bands and producers.

The staging of people and objects, his curiosity and interest in experiments were always paired with the need for aesthetic reduction. Through the interior architecture of movie theaters, Klapsch continued this minimalism. He gave particular weight to the graphic surfaces and breaks which he symmetrically monumentalized with a sharp eye for great cinema era vocabulary.

He also propels this game with dimensions and dissociations in his digital montages. A woman with an old suitcase is waiting for the train which stops in front of a frame-filling “Plattenbau” (pre-fabricated high-rise). The woman, the train and the architecture all appear to have come together by chance from other worlds into this picture. The banality of the scene is broken through its non-ignorable artistry. Staged for the moment, the photograph only lives the situation through photography, because actually, the “Plattenbau” was long ago reverted to where it came from, the computer databank.

Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch