BANGKOK — Nineteen award-winning photo books from prestigious German awards are lying to be looked pixel by pixel at an exhibition in Phayathai.
Artistic, abstract and unusual photography collected in photo books which won the German Photobook Prize in recent years are on display for the rare chance to get personal with each book by eyes and hands.
Among the 19 photo books is “Reenactment MfS,” in which Berlin photographer Arwed Messmer revisited material taken from the archives of the Stasi secret police of failed attempts to escape East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down. The images reflect not only the atrocities of the time, but also records of people who were forced to “re-enact” their failed escape attempts – in which some ended up dead. It won the 2016 Silver Award.
For art and architecture aficionados, Jakob Straub’s “Roma Rotunda” looks inside 36 Rome church domes to capture their splendor. What makes the book more marvelous is that readers can survey all photos at the same time by pulling them out at a length of 18 meters.
“Begegnungen auf Feuerland” or “Encounters in Tierra del Fuego” is a collection images of indigenous people in Southern Patagonia, or Tierra del Fuego, around 1918 by German priest Martin Gusinde. Though the native population no longer exists, their culture and rites were recorded through Gusinde’s lens.
Admission is free.
The exhibition is open 10am to 6pm on weekdays and closes at 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays. It runs through Feb. 24.
The Design Centre of Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University is located in front of Triam Udom Suksa school on Phayathai Road. It can be reached from BTS National Stadium or MRT Sam Yan by taxi or foot.
