Thomas Demand - Room

Thomas Demand recreates photographs of infamous scenes with the scenes made in colour paper and card. The scenes are not places famous in themselves, but are locations where political or historical events took place. Often the places themselves are conspicuously absent of any telling signs, they are anonymous corridors, bathtubs, polling stations (scroll to bottom), a kitchen, offices, working rooms, and so on. Each of these spaces resonate with barren modernity, and in that regard the distance of that 'essence' is brought out in the paper reconstruction, with its cool shapes and the flat generalities of formal description. However, more significant are the events that transpired in these whether they are locations for murders (the corridor and bathroom); of corrupted elections (polling station); Saddam's final hideout (kitchen); the stormed offices of the stasi after the political changeover in germany; or the room where L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics. Demand's images resonate when this is discovered in the utter absence of the significance of the space. Everything that took place is not there, even when the results of the events are still recorded.

One of the notable aspects of Demand's reconstruction is that they are built from mass media images of a scene. Often the media images are spectacular and empty themselves - they disclose the event presented but distant the viewer and leave an intelligent observer wondering what exactly is represented, as the final point of the images is not there. The paper models underscore this absence. Another aspect is that he takes the scene and reconstructs and rephotographs it slightly different from the original image. By reconstructing the scene and not the image directly Demand asks us to engage with the reality of the place and with the act of perceiving a space, which is quite different from the act of viewing a mediated image reconstructed. It engages with how we read the physical space in the photographic image and the incredibly significant but not always obvious difference between the two. This is the most haunting aspect of Demand's work, the most compelling articulation of the basic premise of his photography - an insistence on the critical eye, and of reflectively understanding our viewing experience.

It is unfortunate that in some ways this role of perception of photography and of the understanding of mediated images is the real subject of Demand's work. That slender act of repositioning on top the major undertaking of reconstruction is the key. The rooms in which it happened are, when viewed collectively, less significant. It is almost as if it is the arbitrary choices and their broadly coherent (but not always completely convincing) selection was contributing to the experience of the hollowness, because of a lack of method deeply embedded in his images. Or perhaps it is better understood that there are several projects at work in his ouvre, and that the paper cut-outs betray a false consistency. There are the historical spaces most obviously in the earlier work; and more recently there has been a shift towards work which opens up a critical space regarding perception and knowledge more directly. Sounds rooms, recording equipment and computers now feature more often than mediated images of loaded politicised nowheres.

However, the experience of each individual work is compelling, from the soft general institutional lighting in the space, to the cooler-that-thou aesthetic which belies the critical role space testifies to. The formal paper processes are as beguiling as any architect's model and the relation of photograph to photograph is continually disturbing. Demand is undoubtably a very significant photographer, whose exacting mind is locked to his quietly impassioned eye and provides an important and original contribution to contemporary photography, even if there are questions regarding exactly where in the conceptual field the illusions are taking place.

(Demand is currently on show at the MoMA.