Fotoecke/Photo Booth

The German artist Demand continues to be one of the most interesting and important artists working in documentary media. This work depicts a photo booth used for political detainees in the former GDR. The booth is believed to have contained hidden X-ray apparatus that led to the deaths of former prisoners from blood cancer. Characteristically, the work explores political and historic events as source material and subject for a reconstructed documentary image. Demand is not a photographer in a conventional sense. The source material for his images is usually taken from mass media. These are constructed as paper models which are then photographed creating an illusion that they are original photographic documents. This photograph was presented by the Art Fund through Art Fund International.