Introducing Juraj Lipscher as featured in All over the place! curated by William A. Ewing.
 

 

JURAJ LIPSCHER is a Switzerland-based chemist and photographer. As the latter, he’s applied the aesthetic of chemistry to his photography by producing austere black and white images that are almost clinical in tone. In his series, “Body Shops,” that Lipscher says is dedicated to facilities devoted to the care of human bodies, he photographs maternity wards, plastic surgery clinics, beauty salons, brothels, crematoriums, and autopsy rooms. Lipscher explains, “An important part of my work is having an overall concern or idea. I go and look for my images at specific locations and specific settings rather than waiting for them to happen. Looking back at ‘Body Shops,’ I see it as a stringent and objective documentation of a subjective idea.”

 
Though Lipscher has photographed exteriors as well, often residential landscapes, as in his series “Nowheresville.” “I wanted to show the interchangeability and anonymity of rural cityscapes,” he says. “Nowheresville” consists of sleepy suburban still lifes: houses, front yards, picket fences, hedges, and street signs. While beautiful, they possess an ominous, lifeless quality. “I want to document my subjects in a very distanced and objective manner,” Lipscher says, “so that the viewer is forced to provide his or her own interpretation. I am also interested in isolating traits of the national character of the Swiss despite or maybe because of the fact that I am actually a stranger in this country.”
 
—Tami Mnoian