Street Photography nominee

How we look at things shows what we are!

Oliver Krebs developed a photography which deliberately moves between the “classical” photographic angle and a painterly context. - with its metamorphoses.

The search for criteria by which to judge images, which is becoming increasingly relevant in their production and selection, brought to my attention a seemingly absurd project. In 1976 NASA set up a committee to choose 115 images that would be encoded as a dataset on a golden phonograph record and then sent on a journey through outer space to communicate with potential extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The idea of portraying the whole of humankind living on our planet Earth in all its diversity to some form of intelligence that would receive this information at some distant point in space and time is gloriously absurd. But our need to explain ourselves to others is all too human and endearing.

A photography that in its directness leads to abstraction. These are images that struggle to be matter-of-fact and thereby take on something of the stage setting.

Oliver Krebs studied painting with Per Kirkeby at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and graduated as a master student in Georg Herold’s sculpture class. His path to photography was therefore not necessarily predetermined. But his career reveals an artist’s way of thinking. Oliver Krebs seeks the imaging medium for his artistic investigations in art: In photography, he investigates the simple yet almost unanswerable question of what makes a picture a picture and what role the individual im-age elements play.Since 1994 he is also working as a producer in advertising, cinema and TV productions. From 2003 to 2005 he taught at the FH Darmstadt in the media department. Oliver Krebs now lives and works in Berlin. His work has been shown in an number of exhibitions.