Homecoming, Sun & Ruin

Björn Siebert

Björn Siebert calls his works Remakes. They are reconstructions, that is, faithful re-enactments, of amateur photos from the depths of the World Wide Web. Piece by piece in painstaking research, he assembles what in the found image was a chance constellation of material conditions. The strangely fortuitous pictorial moment of the snapshot is reconstructed as a carefully arranged composition and elevated to a new symbolic level with the precision of plate-camera photography. Siebert is interested in investigating the structures of visual communication in our culture and the enigmatic potential that may be concealed in other people’s intuitively created images. His translation of motifs from popular culture and everyday life into large-format images poses questions about relations of repetition and difference, authorship and originality, and about how poses refer to reality in the medium of photography.