Drift
photographs by
Wolfgang Zurborn
In his series, Drift, Wolfgang Zurborn captures complex visual collages (or, visual collisions) as they appear in “real-life”. When the single point of view is flattened through the lens of his camera, you can start to understand one of the ideas at work here.
Peter V. Brinkemper writes, in his introduction to Zurborn’s book:
Initially “Drift” means the imperceptibly slow deviation that results from the difference between one’s intended movement and natural currents. A growing distance that can only be offset by skillful steering or the massive use of one’s own motor.
Drift thus means an awareness that at any time it is possible to stray off course, that distraction factors must be coped with, and that – in the long run – crucial cross currents, without any further intervention, can lead you into an unforeseen somewhere-else.
Without any resistance […] drift becomes a state of subtle or violent being-moved in a game of proximate and distant forces. Drift is a halfway unintended form of movement, a kind of passive change and mutation…
Brinkemper then goes on to warn:
Anyone who for a time surrenders himself to the risk of drift gains a wary or revealing insight into the broad spectrum of effective forces and factors within the environs passing before him and quickly understands that he shares in this interplay of forces and should refuse to become an isolated subject by excluding himself mentally, functionally and technically from our biosphere and cosmos.
To my mind, however, these photographs have a wry sense of humor, and a kind of Zen amazement at what we can find right in front of our eyes. Drift is like that famously simple saying by Garry Winogrand. To paraphrase: Photography is about the way things look when they are photographed.
I think Zurborn drifts through our modern cluttered environment with an alert eye, and chooses his visual collisions very well.
— Jim Casper
You can also view the photographs in a larger format as a self-running slide show.
Drift
photographs by Wolfgang Zurborn
text by Peter V. Brinkemper
Hardcover: 144 pages, 59 color photos
Publisher: Kehrer, Heidelberg
Language: English/German
ISBN: 978-3-939583-68-4
