39 year old Johannes Marburg works as an international architectural photographer. He studied architecture in Karlsruhe, Germany, and lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
White silence: An almost empty space stretches out into the open in front of the observer. It is cold, bereft of any signs of life. There are white cubes and white oblong squares. Like an optical barrier they cleave through the office as well as the picture. Parallel angles and rectangular planes are evenly dominating. Only on second sight can you detach your view from the right angle. There is a hint of green shimmering through the window pane. There are plants, signs of nature: This room is not lifeless - it originates from life.
Before Johannes Marburg started to take photos of the office of the metalworkers’ employers’ association Südwestmetall, the employees had to pick up all workaday items which could interfere with his work. The office had to be perfectly empty, not a single pencil to be left on the white desks’ surface. Stripped down to the naked core.
It is precision that Marburg is after. In his photographs he reduces reality to the essence. His pictures are clear-cut and of a strict clarity, characterized solely by the structure and materials provided by the room itself. Trivialities and coincidental matters are “filtered out”. He decomposes the building into an array of different motifs he then rearranges. In this process an essence of reality emerges, that at the same time diverges from the reality it originated from: His pictures hint at something hidden beneath the surface without getting entangled in mere shadow play. “Tense tranquility” is what Marburg calls his style of art.
As an architectural photographer he is constantly dealing with the critical balance between art and commerce. For Marburg taking pictures of an employers’ association’s branch like he did in Heilbronn or documenting the newly built fashion boutiques’ exterior and interior architecture for adidas, one of the leading brands in the sporting goods industry, in Beijing, Los Angeles and Hongkong is a quest for striking a balance between customer expectations and artistic liberty. While the client’s primary goal is to obtain information, the artist wants to interpret.
These seemingly opposing positions in fact influence each other. The public’s response to Marburg’s way of blending architectural photography with his artistic expression while at the same time meeting the informational needs of his clients stands as proof that this kind of dialectic contradiction can be solved in practice.
Johannes Marburg uses the CAMBO WDS camera system with SCHNEIDER-KREUZNACH lenses and LEAF APTUS digital back in his work.
Clients (selection):
adidas AG, Herzogenaurach l Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin l Barkow Leibinger Architects, Berlin l BauNetz Online, Berlin l bcc Berliner Congress Center
Cow PR, London l Dominik Dreiner Architect, Gaggenau l Foster and Partners, London l OSA Office for Subversive Architecture, London
Südwestmetall, Stuttgart l Vitra AG, Birsfelden l WGG Schnetzer Puskas, Basel l Zapco Ltd., Zug l Zwimpfer Partner Architects, Basel
Publications (selection):
AMC, Paris (Issue No. 168 03/2007)l architekturbild e.v., Stuttgart (European Architectural Photography Prize, 2007) l Architecture Today, London Archithema, Zürich (Ideales Heim 05/2006) l Baumeister, Munich l Bauwelt, Berlin l Verlagshaus BRAUN, Berlin (Magic Metal, 2008) l daab, Cologne (steel design, 2007) l DBZ, Gütersloh l Detail, Munich l DVA, Munich l die gestalten verlag, Berlin (Spacecraft, 2007) l Evergreen by TASCHEN, Cologne (Spectacular Buildings, 2007) l fivetonine Wirtschaftswoche, Düsseldorf (Issue No. 3 2007) l Icon Magazine, London (Issue No. 41 11/2006) l Phaidon, New York (New Retail, 2005) l Première Vision, Paris (2008) l Prestel, London (Reflections Norman Foster, 2005 l Selected Views No. 9, Darmstadt 2007 l surface magazine, San Francisco (Issue No. 60 2006) l TASCHEN, Cologne (Architecture Now! 5, 2007)
