Hans-Christian Schink

"Surveying Schink's oeuvre, it is evident that his work has been compelled by twinned impulses: on the one hand, a peripatetic project of social documentation examining historical effects of building development on landscape, and on the other a self-reflexive approach to the medium and the conditions of photographic representation. These two modes of image making have often developed in parallel series, their overlap occasionally breaking through to different registers."
Phil Taylor, excerpted from Specific Exposures: The Photography of Hans-Christian Schink in Hans-Christian Schink.

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HANS-CHRISTIAN SCHINK
Text by Ulrike Bestgen, Matthias Flügge, Antje Rávic Strubel, Thomas Weski.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775728263 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 9/30/2011
Active | In stock

HANS-CHRISTIAN SCHINK: 1H
Text by Michael Pidwirny.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775726610 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2011
Active | In stock

HANS-CHRISTIAN SCHINK: TRAFFIC PROJECTS
Essay by Matthias Flügge.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775714259 | US $60.00
Pub Date: 8/2/2004
Active | In stock

Hans-Christian Schink

Hans-Christian Schink: Tohoku

Text by Rei Masuda.
Published by Hatje Cantz

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m., the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan experienced the most powerful earthquake ever registered in the country. Its aftermath, a tsunami, leveled a 400-kilometer-long stretch of coastline dotted with cities and villages, while an accident at the nuclear reactor in Fukushima exacerbated a catastrophe of unimaginable scale. One year later, photographer Hans-Christian Schink (born 1961) spent several weeks traveling through the region on a grant from the Villa Kamogawa Kyoto. In Tohoku, Schink combines familiar still photographs of landscapes--in which the destructive power of the wave is only subtly apparent--with images that viscerally translate the full force of the disaster: houses piled on top of each other like toys, industrial buildings reduced to steel skeletons, boats perched on dry land and the concrete walls of quays with deep cracks that testify to the unimaginable strength of the impact.

Hans-Christian Schink

Text by Ulrike Bestgen, Matthias Flügge, Antje Rávic Strubel, Thomas Weski.
Published by Hatje Cantz

With his photographs of telephone cables rigged in an otherwise pristine Vietnamese jungle, or utility poles and wires strung across Niigata's snowy landscape, Leipzig-based photographer Hans-Christian Schink (born 1961) has documented the clash between civilization and nature for over three decades, exerting a major influence on the German photographic scene. He first garnered attention for his series Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit, for which he spent seven years documenting new traffic-related constructions in eastern Germany. Regardless of location, Schink's images bear testimony to humankind's brutal inscriptions upon the environment--damage to which they draw particular attention through the careful omission of human presence. Schink's avoidance of more overtly critical content only further intensifies the memorability of his photographs. This publication surveys the artist's work from 1980 to the present day.

Hans-Christian Schink: 1h

Text by Michael Pidwirny.
Published by Hatje Cantz

Negative film can only be exposed to a certain point, beyond which the photochemical process is reversed and the negative's darkest areas become light again. For Hans-Christian Schink's series 1h, a 1955 picture by Minor White, titled "Black Sun," was a source of inspiration. 1h employs an effect called "real solarization." For 1h, Schink deliberately chose to combine this process with a very long exposure, acheiving effects of abstraction and blur.

Hans-Christian Schink: Traffic Projects

Essay by Matthias Flügge.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

Empty highway bridges, gigantic concrete pillars, tracks for the Intercity railway--all devoid of humans and bathed in cool winter light. The theme of these striking images captured by Leipzig photographer Hans-Christian Schink is the massive road-and-rail infrastructure program for eastern Germany, projects designed to transform it into “flourishing landscapes.” Schink's photographs map the violent incursions into the surroundings--”monsters of infrastructure,” as the German daily newspaper FAZ aptly put it--as technology has cut and sliced its way through the countryside. All scenes are shown from the pedestrian's perspective, often at points destined to be bursting at the seams with traffic in the not-so-distant future. Yet despite the cool sobriety of these photographs, one also recognizes allusions to the landscape paintings of the Romantic period in images such as a roadbed disappearing into the distant mist.