Manhattan Picture Worlds

Time and again between 2003 and 2008, Thomas Wrede takes photographs of the billboards in New York. He thereby concentrates on details, artistically relating them to people and the atmosphere. The city becomes a stage. Ideals advertised larger than life-size imperceptibly merge with reality of life and street realism against this backdrop. Enticing make-believes supplant the shabbiness of reality, yet the contrast also heightens the fast pace and vitality of a city that is constantly finding and reinventing itself.

Similar to his earlier series of photographs, Wrede is even here concerned with proportional offsets and the creation of different layers of reality. Snapshots of multilayered situations merge into a classical collage, a reality collage that only exists momentarily at the trigger of a camera and seen from that specific vantage point.