Note · 7 June 2026
[ku] 13/26 Art
Not Places, but States.
From the series Hidden Places · Roman Thomas
I work with photography on the question of how reality comes into being in the act of seeing. My pictures do not show places, they make states tangible.
How Reality Comes into Being in Seeing
The starting point is always a real place. In the photographic process it begins to change. What seems familiar withdraws from clear legibility, and between what we believe we recognize and what we actually see, a space opens up in which perception becomes unstable.
For me, photography is a means of slowing down the act of seeing. In this slowing, perception changes, and room emerges for what cannot be pinned down with certainty.
My pictures do not show places, they make states tangible: the moment in which the familiar begins to slip away and outer reality, memory, and inner image overlap.
From Urban Space into the Landscape
In Hidden Places I work with urban spaces that seem unambiguous at first glance. Architecture, light, and structure point to something apparently familiar, and at the same time a distance arises that makes these places seem removed. The pictures show not just a place but a state in which reality and imagination merge.
In Heimat I let go of the stability of the visible. Through the movement of the camera during exposure, the structures begin to flow, and concrete places become pictorial spaces in which the visible overlaps with inner images. Both bodies of work are joined by the same question, how space becomes an inner experience.
When the Picture Is No Longer a Likeness
Even where my pictures are no longer made photographically, the question remains the same. What remains when the picture is no longer a likeness. In works such as Disruption, AI is my tool, like a brush. I layer, intervene, discard, until the picture I had in my mind is there.
These works, too, are not looking for a place. They make a state tangible: the familiar turning strange, and the strange seeming familiar. What remains in the end is not a likeness but an experience.