About »14. Stock« (»14th floor«)

It is a photo essay about perspectives, points of view, and light painting. A visual diary that tells stories from everyday office life around my workplace. The 14th floor of a high-rise building called »Kastor« has been my workplace since April 2017, right next to the Frankfurt Trade Fair.

With the relocation from a rather uniform, enclosed office area in a small town to the lively quarter around Frankfurts »Platz der Einheit« the desire to discover was awakened. I curiously observe how the light changes the buildings during the day, which people work, live or even just linger for a short time as trade fair visitors.

I see what changes and what remains constant. I hold on to what I see. The result is a subjective description of the place, a topographical sketch of light, shadow, structure, colours.

In the portfolio, I show a selection of seven images from the project. The whole series actually consists of 60 pictures, six short movies and the two books »14. Stock« and »Miniaturen«. Whats makes this project important to me is, that after several single short movies I did in the past, here film got its first significant appearance. The videos are an integral part of the work.

Besides working with moving images, the series »14. Stock« also led me to new ways of working. It was the first time I worked with a curator to discuss image selection and order.

For the second book, »Miniaturen«, the writer Katrin Pitz joined the project. We developed this book in a kind of image-text ping-pong: She saw all the pictures and started to write short stories. I read the stories without knowing which pictures she had chosen. In the next step, I added the images to the stories which suited best in my opinion. Then we decided together on an order for the image-text combinations and I designed the final book.

»14. Stock« had its first public appearance from November 2018 to January 2019 and it is shown in Darmstadt's »Literaturhaus« (»House of Literature«) from May until September 2019.

Project page: www.marcelrauschkolb.de/14terstock

About »Touching from a Distance«

»Touching from a Distance« is a project I worked on from 2014 to 2016. It collects scenes I witnessed mostly on the streets while walking around, like a flaneur. It is documentary, but more in the sense of the »Stream of consciousness«-photography of the New York School photographers who worked in the sixties/seventies.

What you see are everyday people in everyday situations, nothing spectacular. But for me this is the exciting part of photography: To see the sensation in these scenes, to tell a little story in a single image or a bigger one if you see the whole series together. Its also about encouraging the viewer to develop his own story for a specific image. So the project is about everyday life, but it also developed to a more significant study on form, colour, and composition.

The series was shown two times: At Galerie Will, Darmstadt, in September and October 2016 and from March to April 2017 at the cultural centre »Kulturmetzgerei« in Seeheim (near Darmstadt).

For this series, I designed the book »TFAD« (Touching from a Distance«).

About the title: »Touching from a Distance« is a quote from Joy Divisions song »Transmission«. Ian Curtis wrote here about radio, but for me this phrase is a perfect metaphor for the work of a photographer: When we take a picture, we touch our subject with our cameras, but we always have a distance, just by the camera between us and the object.

Project page: www.marcelrauschkolb.de/tfad