Jan Madeus · Berlin

Auf Augenhöhe

Apartment blocks repainted in the colours of their refurbishment. In every picture one window, photographed at eye level, with the shutter down. The colour is the buildings’ own.

At Eye Level

These houses were insulated and repainted. Someone chose the green, the red, the ochre — someone in an office, for a whole estate at once. The people behind the walls were not asked.

What they can decide is the shutter. Up or down. It is the last part of the façade that still belongs to them, and it is the part that says: not today.

So I stand at eye level and photograph straight on, one window at a time. The wall stays flat, nothing recedes. You are as close as you would be standing there, and you get no further.

In Das Haus gegenüber I remove the traces of habitation myself. Here the inhabitants do it for me. The same erasure, a different hand. That is why the colour stays exactly as I found it — in this series it is evidence, not a decision of mine.

What is Auf Augenhöhe?

Auf Augenhöhe (German for “at eye level”) is a fine-art photography series by the Berlin artist Jan Madeus. It photographs post-war German apartment blocks after thermal-insulation refurbishment — render repainted in green, ochre, red and blue — with a single window in each frame and the roller shutter fully closed.

The rules are fixed. The camera stands at eye level. The wall runs parallel to the picture plane, so nothing recedes into depth. One window per picture, the shutter down, and the plinth with its basement vents stays in frame as a second kind of closed opening. Unlike the artist’s series Fremde Fassaden, where colour is shifted in post-production, the colour here is left exactly as found. It is the colour of the refurbishment, and it carries the argument: the façade was decided from above, the shutter from behind.

Blue rendered wall with a yellow painted frame around a single window, the roller shutter fully down, a yellow band and paving below

Pale grey-lilac wall with a closed white roller shutter beside a red painted rectangle, a blue-grey plinth with a basement vent and a strip of flowering plants below

Ochre rendered wall with a closed white roller shutter, a downpipe at the right edge, a grey plinth with two basement vents and a strip of grass

Red panelled facade with visible joints, a closed white roller shutter, two basement vents and a strip of grass below

Salmon rendered wall with a white shutter housing and closed shutter, a garden of dark green plants along the lower edge

Pale blue wall with a closed roller shutter above a stronger blue plinth carrying three barred basement windows

Almost white wall with a closed white roller shutter, a blue-grey plinth with two basement vents and a strip of grass

About this series

The series is ongoing. It is built by repetition rather than by variety: the same distance, the same height, the same closed shutter, until the differences between one wall and the next become the subject. What changes from picture to picture is a colour that somebody else chose.

New work in this series goes out first to First Viewings, the small mailing list that sees it before it appears anywhere else.

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