Jan Madeus · Berlin

Abstract

Abstract photography: shadow used as drawing, light used as material. Photographs framed until the subject falls away and only line, plane and tone are left — a black and white series made in Berlin and on the road. Prints in small, numbered editions.

Orange triangle of light on a white wall in an empty room

Wire chairs and their shadows on snow, seen from above, black and white

A bright window glowing in a dark room with drifting smoke, black and white

Shadows of window bars falling across a pale door and its handle

Looping shadow of a plant structure on a wall in Berlin, black and white

Red and orange triangle of light on a bare wall beside an open doorway

Bare tree in front of a white wall, reduced to a graphic silhouette

Almost white minimal composition of grey planes and a soft shadow edge

Dark water surface with pale reflections, a near-monochrome abstract study

Red triangle of light meeting a diagonal shadow on a white wall

Blurred dark silhouette of a figure, high contrast black and white

White interior corner in Duisburg with a narrow band of blue sky

About this abstract photography series

Abstract is the most reduced of the four series. Nothing is staged and nothing is built in software — the frames are found, then cropped until scale and context fall away. What is left is the relation between a shadow and the plane it lands on, and the moment a wall stops being a wall.

Most of the work is black and white, because colour would name things these pictures are trying not to name. Where colour survives — a red triangle of light on a building site, a slice of sky at the end of a corridor — it is left exactly as it was found. Every image is available as an archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper in a small, numbered edition. The series sits beside the colour work: where Fremde Fassaden shifts the colour of a building front, Abstract removes it, and both start from the same habit of standing in front of a surface for a long time. How that way of looking is made — and why it is not decoration — is set out in the note on abstract architecture photography. Sizes, editions and prices for these black and white prints are listed on the prints page.

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