Shannon McGill Senior Portfolio: Artist-Pablo Zuleta Zahr

Pablo Zuleta Zahr's photography reminds me of my own work conceptually and aesthetically. He uses repetition, a theme which I can't seem to get away from, and a minimal amount of visual information. Zahr makes observations about society by photographing individuals and compiling their similarities afterwards to discover patterns. I too reference my relationship to society and its individual role in most of my work. His work in this series is beneficial in my recent research.

Zahr was born in Vina del Mar and now lives and works in Berlin. he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy where he studied under Thomas Ruff. To make these images he set up a video camera in a subway for ten hours and records all the passers by. later he finds commonalities between people (like shirt color and hats) and compiles a photograph. "Some, like the secretaries, appear to purposefully tailor themselves, others in contrast are blatantly anxious to protect their individuality at any price, which has even more grotesque effect the more frequently it pops up"

(source: http://www.studiolacitta.it/English/Artists/PabloZuletaZahr.php)

"I want to tell everything. And above all, I want to show the inconspicuous."

-the artist (source: see interview link)

“I don’t know anything about these people,“ Zuleta Zahr says looking at the fleeing passers-by that have occupied him for months, “I only look for the coincidences.” That again sounds very unassuming. Because doesn’t a panorama of our society hide within these accumulated coincidences? The deeper we go into them, the more we find out about questionable individuality, about brand consciousness and about similarities and differences between two metropolises on two continents in a globalized world."

(source: Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch at http://www.lumas.com/?id=721&artist=63&wid=100&doc=info&ed= )