Munich-based photographer Thomas Weinberger has a radiantly beautiful series of industrial and infrastructural landscape photographs called
synthesen
.
The images are otherworldly, Ballardian, gemlike. The thick, almost surreal dimensionality of their lighting comes from Weinberger’s technique, which is to combine two different photographs of the same scene – one taken during the day, one taken at night.
His shot “Nizza” (2004), for instance, almost literally glows, the city burning with a white light as if liquid chrome has drowned the streets; while “Alexanderplatz” (Berlin, 2003) makes the Kaufhof look stroboscopically frozen, even extraplanetary or ossified. Then there’s “Cracker” (2003), where we’re greeted with an ESSO gas refinery in Ingolstadt – down to its shining vortices of pressure tubes and valving. “Zone 30” (Munich, 2004) looks like the opening shot of a sci-fi thriller about radiation poisoning in suburban Germany… Etc.
The crispness – and gleaming, semi-symmetrical intricacy – of the shots totally amazes me.

[Image: Thomas Weinberger, "Flughafen München" 2003].

Readers of German can download five short reviews of Weinberger’s work; everyone else can just visit his website and gape.

(Discovered via Alexander Trevi and
juniorbonner
; also seen at
Conscientious
, kottke.org,
things magazine
– and so on. For photos of a very vague aesthetic similarity see
The Total Horizon
).