O.T._XVIII(NYC)

With his photographic works from the series O.T. (2007–2010), Stefan Panhans remains faithful to the locations of his earlier photographic explorations. These are highly staged locations, such as the promenades of shopping malls and other artificial landscapes. However, in these large-format images, people have withdrawn from the scene and attention has shifted to arrangements of objects and spatial situations. Instead of photographically revealing the meticulously staged scenes and their protagonists, as in previous series, and thus making their display and reification the central theme, this time his perspectives disrupt the unity of the visible representation, finding unusual framing, looking beside, past, and over to the incidental, finding darker, more unclear moments, or perhaps nested reflections.

These images tend to be surreal, and similar to the surreal film worlds of David Lynch, in which the idealized surface of American life repeatedly breaks open to reveal something completely different. One could speculatively read Panhans' O.T. series as part of a journey into the unconscious of the glossy world of consumption, fashion, luxury, and tourism itself.