AFTERMATH

For his pictures, Jörn Vanhöfen (1961) travelled to parts of the world that are changing rapidly. They are always places where unreserved belief in permanent growth and endless profit are the order of the day, as the aim of his photographic work is to document the consequences of this fatal approach.

From the Chicago Stock Exchange and the townships of Cape Town, to the forest fires of Apulia and the junk yards of his home town in the Ruhrgebiet, he captures these modern ruins of our times. The aesthetic appeal of his compositions lies in its ambiguity. His images have a fascinating beauty, yet they also scare us as they reveal the inevitable consequences of our behaviour.

Vanhöfen calls himself a “political landscape photographer”, who wants to present his pictures as a “debate on cultural idiosyncrasies”, as he once said in an interview. In them, the beauty and the alarming always lie close together, but without any trace of grandeur. 


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