Roland Fischer

* 1958 in Saarbrücken, Germany
lives in Munich and Beijing

Roland Fischer is one of the key figures of German contemporary photographic art; starting in 1980, he was one of the first young German photographers to experiment with large-format portraits, and, with that, conferred upon photography a new and vivid pictorial quality. His themes are people and the places they inhabit: via the “Los Angeles Portraits” – images of people of various ages standing up to their shoulders in the motionless, monochrome waters of assorted swimming pools – Fischer’s path led him to his large-format “Collective Portraits”, which, in their delicate, two-dimensional visual language, opened up a new genre within the boundaries of photography. With equal clarity, Fischer dedicated himself to architecture and created new, superior perspectives on the highly complex Gothic style and the functional orthogonal façades of the modern high-rise. In his latest body of work, “New Architectures”, Fischer addresses emblematic buildings of modern and contemporary architecture, abstracting the actual surface structures into formal geometric compositions.

“When we look at the world, the eye is the organ of cognition – and perception of architecture is an important part of our visual experience….Through the medium of photography the shape of the visible world can be brought to us in a straight and unfiltered way. Its permeability together with the possibilities provided by computer alteration give us new choices to represent phenomena of reality.” (Roland Fischer on “New Architectures”)