Niels Schubert Fotograf | BFF

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ANDREAS LANGEN writes about BETON & STAHL:
Construction sites have a lousy image. They make noise, dust and dirt, they cost nerves, they gobble up money. Posters along their fencing are often enough prophylactically apologize for their existence.

The Stuttgart photographer Niels Schubert sees it differently. He finds construction sites enchanting. For him, they are not the necessary evil that you have to put up with to be able to photograph a shiny new building against a blue and white spotted sky. In fact, he doesn‘t even need a building. For Niels Schubert, tunnel portals, reinforcement mesh, tarpaulins and puddles of in-situ concrete are reason enough to align the camera. „Worthy of image“ is what art scholars call what artists consider worthy of being elevated to the rank of the extraordinary through their compositions. Schubert‘s documentary style has difficulty with such ennoblement. He shows what it looks like, where people flex, cast, criticize and drag. And probably also cursed. For in a weather where you don‘t chase a dog out of the door, he succeeds in taking the best pictures:
Water is on the floor slab, when despite the rain a man in signal-bright East Frisian mink enters the picture.
On his way to the Golden Ratio, he performs a sweeping turn as if he were not carrying a four-meter bar on his shoulder, but a ballerina across the stage. Such scenes best illustrate why, for Niels Schubert, architectural photography does not begin where convention dictates – namely after the completion of the greenery on the outside of a new building – but months or even years earlier.

Schubert celebrates the provisional, pours secondary moments into valid compositions, keeps the outrageous and hardly ever
elegance of load-bearing structures, which are only temporary intermediate steps on the way to the finished building. Structural and civil engineering, the making of, could be called this series of pictures. Whether high-bay warehouse or noble high-tech architecture, Schubert ignores this. He creeps even damp building shells into the cellar-deep bowels, and he takes the stacked containers of a
large construction site pipeline as importantly as the glittering elegance of a final facade.

It goes with the fact that there are always people to be seen who keep the shop running. It is not builders, architects and investors who enliven the scene here, but men standing up to their ankles in tough flowing concrete.
„In the end, it‘s always the guys in the pit or on the scaffolding who build the whole thing,“ says Schubert with undisguised respect.

Perhaps he had in his ear the mocking question that Berthold Brecht once put into the mouth of an imaginary reading worker:
„Where were they going the night the Great Wall of China was finished / the masons? 
Niels Schubert‘s pictures suggest probably on montage, and by the next morning at the latest, on to the shift.

ANDREAS LANGEN

The author is a freelance photographer and journalist. His work as a reviewer and journalist focuses on photography (e.g. at SWR2 Kulturradio, Photonews,
German Photo Book Prize (2006-16). Since the late 1990s continuous teaching at various, mainly German, universities and non-academic institutions.

A bow in 77 Bildtafeln
Size 300x240mm
Price € 30
Excerpts see pdf

Artist Statement
GENOVA – CONCRETE & COLOR

The project came into being when I travelled from Sardinia to Genoa by ferry in 2013 and was able to see the city from the sea in the early morning. At first I was interested in the architectural situation of Genoa; its stage-like location, the rhythmic arrangement of the houses along the narrow coastal strip. I was fascinated by the density and narrowness, the color palette of the palazzi, the confusion and simultaneous order.
That is why I decided to take a closer look around there.

In the end I ended up somewhere else.

I took a room in a hotel on the coast in the east of the city (Albaro).
When I stepped out onto the promenade along Corso Italia, the first thing I saw was a concrete platform extending about 100 meters out to sea. One third of this platform was covered with still closed umbrellas. In between, some older ladies had already sat down on their deck chairs or directly on the ground to enjoy the early, still low and long shady sun in still prevailing peace.
For me this scenario was a visual bull's eye, a unique, almost surreal situation, the trigger for my curiosity and hunger for more.

The very next week I traveled from Stuttgart to Genoa again and plunged into the microcosm of the public bathing places along the coastal road that connects Genoa with its suburbs in the east. Two more trips to the Ligurian capital followed in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Visitors to my exhibition in October and November 2016 and connoisseurs of my work have often asked me to contact the people photographed in advance. I must deny this. If I would do it, I would come to a falsified result. I have to keep myself in the background as much as possible so that people behave naturally and authentically.
I am a photographic reporter and narrator, perhaps also a prey hunter. My work consists from observation, anticipation and execution. However, I am never concerned with betraying, visually devaluing or robbing people of their privacy - after all, they voluntarily go out into the public and thus make themselves visible to everyone - but rather, with all due respect and empathy, to detach them, sometimes more, sometimes less, from their extended environment and thus make them into actors in a snapshot, a short story.
This often results in strictly composed, graphically striking motifs with an almost hyper-realistic impression and high sharpness, both in detail and in depth.
This effect is particularly evident in the chapter "Stabilimento Balneare".
These are the motives around the area of the "Associazione Motonautica Ligure".

More than the classical overviews and views of beach and bathing situations as we know them e.g. from Massimo Vitali, I am interested in the small and small, the details and the arrangement, the togetherness and the opposite of the people in the microcosm of the public, freely accessible bathing places, the organization of the space without consultation, and the resulting patterns and forms. They are the basis for my picture compositions. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)