Jigsaw Falling into Place

Jigsaw Falling into Place is a visual exploration of my conflicting relationship with the surreal, incoherent, and chaotic structure of the urban environment and how the latter affects human beings. I moved to Düsseldorf more than twenty years ago. At that time, some parts of the city looked like an ugly duckling, but still had their own outspoken character and history, represented by post World War II buildings and relics of its industrial past. Since more than ten years the city is undergoing a process of renovation that is profoundly changing both its appearance and its social fabric. With these photos, I'm showing the transformation of the city into an open-air mall, in which advertising and architecture help to blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality, while the role of people shifts from citizens to consumers. Aggregation is now based primarily on consumption. I made this book out of an urgency to express my feelings about the shifts happening in society as well as my fascination for the city's visual jaggedness, which brings me to gravitate more and more towards the places that will saturate my sight: the rapid changes in the architectural and social landscape allow for novelty almost every day.