The Japanese culture amazes and fascinates me with its supposed contrasts. In the big cities the chaos of the masses, narrowness, noise, and neon contrasts with great discipline, courtesy, and people striving for harmony with one another. Creativity, fantasy, and aesthetics make up large parts of Japanese culture. Space constraints and the long hours worked predominantly by men make for a life lived mostly in public, almost without intimacy and desire. As a result, the strict order is offset by debauchery and excess. The tension between individuality and conformity, intimacy and publicity, order and excess, along with other contradictions that seem unusual or even incompatible according to Western European cultural standards, fascinated me and and nourished the Idea to create a photobook “TENSION” (publ. Aug. 2019). This fine art series puts that in a nutshell.

The phenomenon of the mass is in the center of the detailed photographic works “Individual Ornament” by Andreas Kremer. He creates unusual overviews on sceneries of the consumer and leisure world. The choreography of the people in the urban space and landscape panorama does not create a uniform ornament of the mass. The photographer is not interested in clearing up the chaos of everyday life with simplistic pictorial patterns in his photographs as he uses the right moments to visualize complex structures that make it possible to conceive all depicted persons as Individual Beings. Despite showing a very distant view of a “human landscape” the special quality of the images is that they radiate a vibrant dynamic. It can be felt that every creature, every object and every place is important and in exciting relationship to each other.