Germany
Wolfgang
Zurborn
Play Time
The visual worlds of a leisure and media culture, of film, television, internet and advertising on monitors, screens, magazines, billboards and house facades, are so omnipresent that they can no longer be seen separately from real life. The contemporary man finds himself in a play time in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred. The feeling of security in a familiar living space is increasingly moving away from a concrete place to a world full of artificially created myths.
The photographs of the series ‘Play Time’ draw a highly complex picture of our everyday world in multilayered levels, in which the human being is shown in a state between privacy and public. Immersed in urban sceneries full of media attractions, the search for protection in the unmanageable mass can be felt everywhere.
‘Play Time’ is dedicated to the film director Jacques Tati, who had a great influence on the photographic work of Wolfgang Zurborn with his humorous and critical view of modernity.
About Wolfgang
Wolfgang Zurborn was born in Ludwighafen/Rhine in 1956. He studied at the Bavarian State Institute of Photography in Munich from 1977 to 1979 and at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts for Photography / Film Design from 1979 to 1984. In 1985, he was awarded the Otto Steinert Prize by the German Society for Photography (DGPh) in recognition of his project ‘Menschenbilder - Bildermenschen’. In 2008, he received the German Photo Book Award for his publication ‘Drift’. He was nominated for the Vonovia Award for Photography 2018 for his series ‘Play Time’. Exhibitions of his photographic work are shown worldwide.
In addition to his own artistic work, Wolfgang Zurborn is constantly interested in communicating the richness of the medium of photography in various forms. Together with Tina Schelhorn, he has been running the Gallery Lichtblick in Cologne for 38 years and has provided a forum for national and international positions in contemporary photography in over 200 exhibitions. In 2010 he founded the Lichtblick School. Since 1998 he has been on the board of the German Photographic Academy (DFA). In addition, he also has various teaching assignments for photography at German universities and imparts his knowledge in many international workshops. In collaboration with the German Research Foundation and the German House of Research and Innovation in New Delhi, he led master classes with young Indian photographers in Ahmedabad and Kolkata in 2012/13.
Learn more
To learn more about Wolfgang Zurborn and his work visit: www.wolfgangzurborn.de