Interview Thomas Wieflingseder
Photography is about taking bits and pieces of the so-called real world.
Name: Thomas Wieflingseder
Hometown: Vienna, Austria
Style of photography: Drunken sobriety; I still can’t decide between clean new-topographic-like stuff and total pathos.
Type of camera(s): Nikon FG 20, Canon 1000Fn, lately Canon 50 – as long as I have manual settings and the TTL meter is somehow working, I don’t care too much. Canon 400D, when it comes to digital.
Website: www.decode.at & Flickr
What gives you inspiration?
So many different things. Books (Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis, Hans Lebert, Chuck Palahniuk), Films (Stanley Kubrick, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, Werner Herzog, George A. Romero). The work of others that I discover via blogs, dreams (storms, disintegrating woods, melancholic zombies), the woods, rotten places, flickering lights, riding the tube at late hours, and music (currently I’m working on an installation that has its origins in a david-bowie-song I noticed during a late night fire-show in Greece). Inspiration takes strange ways; a shadow on a cardboard can become a 7-minutes-multiple-screen-video-installation.
What are your influences?
Loneliness, isolation, fear, disintegration.
On the one hand artists that work with uncanny, disturbing and dark elements. Lars von Trier, Gregory Crewdson, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Francis Bacon, Francisco de Goya, Caravaggio. Lately I’ve been fascinated by Thomas Demand’s work and the general idea of constructing realities without even using “real environment”. I also discovered Edward Burtynsky’s work and the whole New Topographics Movement, and I totally love it, although it’s pretty much the total opposite of the artists mentioned above. So I’m struggling between those two poles, dark pathos and documentary.
Why did you choose these photos?
Currently I’m a bit experimenting, everything’s changing and shifting a little without a big picture. These photos pretty much represent what I’m up to at the moment, it’s that simple.
What does photography mean to you?
Photography is about taking bits and pieces of the so-called real world and reuse them to create your own reality (on purpose or not).
Photos:
Copyright reserved by Thomas Wieflingseder
