HORST HAMANN
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
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C.V.
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PUBLICATIONS
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ADDITIONAL CONTEXT
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WORKS
Verticals
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
VERTICAL ABSTRACTION
Cities are lines, grids, moving patterns, abstract and expressive entities made of buildings, streets, subways, and the people moving within them. In art since the 19th century what has been commensurately alluring is to capture the modern city in pictures, whether expressionistically or like illustrative Pop art. The German photographer Horst Hamann found a specifically artistic expression for the language in the context of the compact built landscape pressing into the vertical space of cities. Hamann has celebrated international success with his method following architecture’s imperative and applying the panorama camera into vertical heights. Born in 1958 in Mannheim, Hamann has traveled as a photographer through over 70 countries. He visited New York for the first time in 1979 and his fascination for this metropolis has not lost its hold over him even since then. For over five years Hamann worked on the images for the photo book published in 1996, New York Vertical, that received numerous national and international awards, including the Kodak Photobook Prize and the Photo Design Gold Award, among others. The Museum of the City of New York honored him with a solo exhibition. In 2005, Horst Hamann published his vertical panorama photographs of Paris as a large-format photo book Paris Vertical. Horst Hamann lives with his wife and two children in New York and Maine.
“It is possible that other people in this city (NYC) have taken vertical photographs with a panorama camera. But never before has this unusual aesthetic had such a compelling effect. It is as if one only understands now, how monumentally everything aspires for the sky: the obvious becomes visible for the first time.”
Freddy Langer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
