Peter Bialobrzeski

Misinterpretation doesn’t exist. Every viewer has their own possibilities of reading an image

– Peter Bialobrzeski

Peter Bialobrzeski (born 1961) is a photographer and a professor of photography at the University of the Arts Bremen in Germany. Peter Bialobrzeski studied Politics and Sociology before he became a photographer for a local paper in his native Wolfsburg/Germany. He traveled extensively in Asia before he went back to the Folkwang School, Essen, and London to study Photography. After having worked as a photojournalist for almost 15 years and published worldwide, Peter in 2004 started to focus more on personal projects. In the last ten years, he has published 16 books, including XXXholy, Paradise Now, Wolfsburg Diary, Kochi Diary.

The landscapes that Peter Bialobrzeski photographs are places where people go to seek quiet or recreation and, though they are populated by many folks, the overall impression is of a grand and vastly scaled landscape filled with memory and meaning. And they are beautiful and transcendent—in this sense a glorious contradiction to the cool, hip, detached aesthetic which they parallel. The series Lost in Transition continues his career-long search for beauty and meaning in a rapidly industrializing world, Bialobrzeski focuses his large-format camera on landscapes that are in the middle of being recreated and celebrates in glorious color and glowing light places that are desolate and uninviting This contradiction produces images that suggest a festival atmosphere while describing isolation and dehumanization. The long exposures required by these mostly nighttime images create ghost-like and other-worldly scenarios which are rooted in reality by the presence of naked trees, people lingering in the shadows, and other evidence of man’s inescapable presence. By choosing not to specifically identify their locations, he points out the universal nature of these conditions.

His work has been exhibited in Europe, the USA, Asia, Africa, and Australia. He won several awards including the prestigious World Press Photo Award 2003 and 2010. Peter Bialobrzeski has been a visiting professor for photojournalism at the University of Essen in 1998/99. Since 2002 Peter is a regular Professor for photography at the University of the Arts in Bremen/Germany. Furthermore, he runs workshops around the world. In 2012 he was honored with the Erich Salomon Award by the German Society of Photographers (DGPh).

Published on March 12, 2021
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