Peter Bialobrzeski

Alex Rühle

Preface by Peter Bialobrzeski. Text by Alex Ruhle.

Paradise Now

Michael Glasmeier

In Heimat, his previous collection of photographs published by Hatje Cantz, German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski, born in 1961, gave us pictures of his homeland that showed it as it had never been seen before. Photo International deemed it "one of the most beautiful and significant photography books this year." Even before that, Bialobrzeski's critically acclaimed exploration of the Asian megacity phenomenon, Neon Tigers, had made him a common topic of debate on the international photography scene. Bialobrzeski's gift is for the portrayal of epic sweep in urban vistas and of the energies that inhabit and galvanize them. In Lost in Transition the photographer applies his grand vision to the transformation of wasteland areas, many of which are located on the peripheries of cities. The photographs were taken in more than 28 cities (including Hamburg, Dubai, New York, Singapore, New Delhi and Kuala Lumpur) and 14 countries and trace the transition from old to new, from the familiar to the abstract, from the dilapidated to the renewed. These images are as seductive and sublime as nineteenth-century Romantic paintings, but their apparent beauty is deceptive. As in his earlier works, Bialobrzeski always tests and pushes at the limitations of the documentary image itself.

Lost in Translation

Wuhan Diary

Give My Regards To Elizabeth is a record of Peter Bialobrzeski's time in England in the early 1990s. Influenced by the British colour photography of the 1980s, the book and the pictures present a fascinating historical document. In some images one can already see the ideas and visual concepts that would, twenty books and numerous exhibitions later, result in Bialobrzeski establishing his reputation as one of today s leading European photographers.

Give My Regards to Elizabeth

An ironic take on the Case Study House Program--initiated in 1945 by Arts and Architecture magazine in an effort to develop low-priced single-family homes by architects such as Richard Neutra and Charles and Ray Eames--German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski's Case Study Homes was shot at the Baseco compound, a squatter camp near the Port of Manila, which is home to an estimated 70,000 people. As Bialobrzeski was considering the series--startling images of provisional structures fashioned from slats, cardboard, corrugated metal and other cast-off materials and refuse--Lehman Brothers Bank collapsed and the media declared a global economic crisis. These recent events lend resonance to Bialobrzeski's images, which recall the photographs of impoverished rural Americans commissioned by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. Conceived as a sketchbook for a larger project, the images evidence the human will to survive and a profound resourcefulness.

Peter Bialobrzeski

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