Photography isn’t Thomas Demand’s prescribed medium, rather it’s one of several mediums he implements as a means to larger ends, the ability to revisit and unpack especially charged moments that define our collective past and present. The German artist has forged a career out of reconstituting these either widely proliferated or passively ubiquitous images in paper and cardboard models that he then re-photographs. This extra step introduces the possibility of subjective distortion and a shifted perspective that forces the viewer to re-evaluate the implications of, say, Hilter’s bombed-out bunker (Room, 1995) or the jarringly unaffected control room at the Fukushima power plant following the 2011 nuclear disaster (Control Room, 2011).
