Catch

Wolfgang Zurborn

by Niko Havranek & Sebastian Gansrigler

Interview by Niko Havranek & Sebastian Gansrigler with Wolfgang Zurborn on 28 pages with 24 images from the series “Frontgarden of Illusios”, “People Pictures - Picture People”, “LUsionen”, “dressur real”, “At the Centre of Speed”, " Drift", “Catch”, “In the Middle of the West” and “Karma Driver”

Catch

by Anne Kotzan

Catch

by Greg Andruszczenko

The decisive moment is a term appropriated by photography in the 1950s and ascribed to Henri Cartier Bresson’s work, describing the intuitive moment to freeze time, capturing an action at the arc of its curvature.

Wolfgang Zurborn’s newest photobook Catch captures multiple events into one pivotal moment. What a drifting eye sees as a continuum of simultaneous events, Zurborn catches and articulates as multiple decisive instantce, forced together with his framing. The photographs seem to be captured in an ordinary glance, perfectly lifted from daily life, but structured in an eye-gyrating combination. The images draw our attention to the cacophony of simultaneous events in daily life that pass us by unendingly. The resulting images are at once simple and at the same time complex in their seemingly collage-like assembly.

Zurborn is a master of rhythmical layout. On the left page, the paths in a park converge to a line made by the meeting of two panes of glass, which point our eye to the right page where the line splits into multiples, which hold taut a billowed out tent-like structure. The composition is complimented on the following two pages by a hanging fishnet, and further a children’s playground built of converging aluminium skeletons, ending in a squared off angle, amidst a background of high-rises.

The following page picks up on the square structure presenting a behind-the- scenes view of a street sign leading next to a staircase, where the composition circulates between three human subjects, simultaneously looking at each other and outwards beyond the frame, stirring our eyes around the page. Next, a blank page is followed by a sitting – maybe hanging – teddy bear. Pause. And so forth through the book.

Catch bangs out a fierce yet loosely controlled rhythm with an improvised jazz sensibility, seeming to meander off beat, but always on. The pace of the book is quick-paced, easy to flip through and catch the beat, but invites further exploration of the individual pages. Zurborn, a German photographer and educator, seems to gleefully break the tradition of the formal, structurally analytical Dusseldorf school in which he was brought up, allowing instead the viewer to make their own analysis. In place of the stark tradition of repetitive analysis, Wolfgang’s images bounce with colour and energy, if they were indeed music to which you’d dance barefoot on a dusty floor, giving in to tribal beats pounding from a hyper saturated world.

This rhythmical layout of the book takes precedent over the beauty of each page’s composition, yet each image invites us to explore it deeply within its aggressively framed full-page print. In one layout our eye chases a flying yellow volleyball watched by several onlookers, some of which are aware of its approach, none of which seem fully ready to receive the ball. Catch challenges us to question our surroundings, stand back, and not take life so seriously.

Flying balls, brilliant colours, sliding linear compositions, surreal mini putt courses, all bouncing faster than Olympic ping pong match back and forth throughout the book are complemented by the frantic introductory composition by collagist, artist and writer Ror Wolf. The entire package is beautifully wrapped in a transparent orange plastic, gently filtering the image underneath, but just enough to remind us to peel back the filters, catch what’s in front of us daily, and pause, and enjoy the ephemeral absurdity of every day.