Thomas Florschuetz: Are You Talking To Me?

by Aris Fioretos, Mark Gisbourne, Christoph Schreier

No one has ever seen the human body quite like Thomas Florschuetz. He brings parts of the body--legs, fingers, heels, arms--into view and composes them into photos full of visual impact and confusing vagueness. His own body serves as motif. Not obviously posed or arranged, his body provides the banal photo fragments that reveal their sensual power once they've been turned into something artificial, unreal. Objects from daily life, too, are presented by Florschuetz in such a way that they transcend their normal function. He photographs portions of plants or buildings, windows and curtains, enlarges them into oversized photos with a three-dimensional quality and mounts them on triptychs or hangs them in other groups. Handled in this way, the subjects of his photographs attain an aura of mystery, detached from the world. This book is the first comprehensive presentation of work done by the artist, who remains the focus of frequent debate.

160 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2004

About the author

Aris Fioretos is a professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. He was educated at Stockholm and Yale Universities. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, most recently from the Swedish Academy and All Souls College, Oxford, he has published several novels and book-length essays in his native Sweden and has rendered the works of Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. His latest, award-winning novel is entitled The Last Greek (2009). Fioretos is also the general editor of the first commented edition of the complete works of Nelly Sachs in German.