Bookshelves by Hans-Peter Feldmann

"Bookshelves" is a 5-panel, life-size photograph of Feldmann's own bookshelves at his home in Düsseldorf. As an artist renowned for using found and discarded objects of others, "Bookshelves" is a rare look at the personal world of a voyeur through the looking glass. The dialectical tension between the banality of the shelf itself and its physical size becomes paramount, as there is a counterintuitive ruse in showing an everyday object shown at a grandiose scale. This idea, however, is unexpectedly met with the fact that the everyday object exists in actuality at the same size. Feldmann mocks photography's promise of a replica of reality, as the obvious impossibility of browsing a fake library (even at life size) becomes an endearingly cruel gag.
303 Gallery