© 2024 Benjamin Renter
City Dissolutions: Seoul and Busan
The series ›City Dissolutions: Seoul and Busan‹ depicts how people live in cities whose edifices are torn down and erected anew quickly. How does the CBD differ from the periphery, where garbage has to be disposed of? How do people try to resuscitate their dehumanised city? Romantic viewing habits from landscape painting are unsettled through the city details in the photographs. Renter lets himself be guided by subjective viewing impressions and thus directs the attention to interstices of this urban space. Constitutive for his imaging practice is the concurrence of diverse dimensions and scales which are typical for metropolises. Renter transposes these into an image with a concentration on doublings, image within image inbrication and overlapping of perspectives. Thereby his pictures appear at times like photo collages, trying to mirror the real city collage faithfully. The series intensifies the multi-perspectivity by opposing close-ups and long shots in order to create an overview of the diversity of contemporary city topoi and to formally analyse them. The architecture of the pictures repeats the architecture of the cities.