How we can create landscape ­photography – looking past such an unsightly thing

Time and again, artistic ­approaches have been radically called into question, and young ­artists have ventured to abandon viewing habits and all things ­familiar. Jürgen Naber works as a commercial photographer.
With the present project »Stops«, showing bus shelters in Norway, the Cologne-based photographer presents his first photo book. Famous Berlin gallerist Rudolf Springer once said to Michael Schmidt, when he first looked at his portfolio decades ago, »That’s boring, that’s good, I’ll take it«, and hosted his first exhibition. Likewise, the bus shelters in Jürgen Naber’s series »Stops« are banal and give the impression as if they just simply existed, stand­ing around like that. Natur­ally, they invoke the all too famil­iar pattern of seriality, but on closer inspection, we may indeed discover something else, for instance, »how we can create landscape photography – looking past such an unsightly thing,« says Jürgen Naber. It includes the ­reversal of the encyclopedic concept of documentary photography and is an intelligent way past the pitfalls of seriality. In addition, this also helps avoid the debilitating effects of the prevalent trend in artistic photog­raphy in recent years of, while not exactly brandishing a paint brush, being ever more eager to tweak the pixels.