Thomas Kellner

He became known above all for his large-format photographs of famous architectural monuments, which, through many individual images and a shifted camera perspective, look like "photo mosaics".

[2] At the chair of Professor Jürgen Königs, a genuine "school of pinhole camera photography"[3] developed at the University of Siegen's Department of Art, Kellner intensively studied the possibilities and limits of this technique.

[6] In 2004 Kellner initiated the project Photographers:Network in his hometown, an annual exhibition curated by him with changing themes and international artists.

[7] Starting in 2005, the artist traveled to Brazil several times to take photographs as part of his commission to represent architectural monuments in Brasilia.

[9] The focus of the students' photographic–artistic work on the bunker was to use Kellner's methodology of deconstructing buildings and reconstructing them in his photographs "as a procedure and transforming it to the conditions on site" (in German "als Verfahren aufzunehmen und auf die Gegebenheiten vor Ort zu transformieren).

The resulting photos were compiled into collages and PowerPoint presentations: "Through the segmentation and subsequent recombination of the different perspectives, a comprehensive and new, but also critical picture of the former bunker complex and the current headquarters of the Musik- und Kunstverein was created[...] The students found the aesthetic examination of National Socialism in a place that is itself a cultural-historical testimony, both haunting and moving."

[10] In 2012 Thomas Kellner travelled to Russia on behalf of RWE to work in Ekaterinburg and Perm to photograph industrial architecture (Genius Loci).

Kellner photographed not only on site in Russia, but also in the surrounding area of Siegen to capture the connection between the two regions in the processing of steel and metal.

(in German "Die Materialität in der Fotografie wird recht selten behandelt, im Unterschied zu allen anderen Genres.

For his photograph of the Grand Canyon, 2160 individual pictures were thus created, and with them 2160 different views of the natural wonder, which he then assembled into a single photo with a length of 5 meters.

[15][16] The first photograph Kellner created with this technique was an image of the Eiffel Tower (1997), which he conceived as a homage to the Cubist artist Robert Delaunay.

Kellner took the typical cubist "multi-view" (in German "Mehransichtigkeit")[17] approach of the objects and developed it into the central design element of his photographs.

The perspective of the individual images – shifted in relation to the Central perspective – gives the impression of movement of the immobile architectural icons: "The viewer thinks that by dismanteling a building into individual pieces of an image and by tilting the camera several times the most famous sites in the world – from the Eiffel Tower to the Brooklyn Bridge – begin to rock, to sway, even to dance.

Only as the eye wanders and adds up a "total view" of many different impressions does the depicted object become clear: "Our brain completes incoming sensory information into a uniform whole and ascribes meaning to this perception" (In German "Unser Gehirn ergänzt einlaufende Sinnesinformationen zu einem einheitlichen Ganzen und schreibt dieser Wahrnehmung Bedeutung zu").