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“Big Sexyland” Tobias Zielony Over a period of a couple of months, Tobias Zielony has photographed young men in a porno cinema and a neighbouring park in Berlin. The men are meeting there, making arrangements or just loitering about. Some of them earn the money they need for drugs or for their living with sex work. The scene is quite mixed: German teenagers, but also young men from Rumania, Poland or Bulgaria. For many of them, Berlin is the starting point for a continued journey. Tobias Zielony, who has previously photographed other groups of adolescents, works in the style of a reportage. The pictures, shot at night or with artificial light, some of them with the usage of infrared light, neither convey a sensationalising nor scandalizing impression. Rather, they are in their depiction of persons, in the worn out chairs or with traces of drug use, unexcited and clear at the same time. Neither do they provide “usable” information. What the photographs primarily convey is how the men use the space, and even that is not always apparent with their gestures and poses. If, for example, one of the young men poses in front of a porno movie, this is meant to be a tourist souvenir from “Big Sexyland,” which for many of them Western Europe is. Porno cinemas, which until recently did not exist in Rumania for instance, are – just like venal love – regarded as one of the promises of western capitalist societies. The like holds for homosexuality, which although no longer prohibited in Rumania, is still not accepted there. Zielony accentuates these kinds of, also imaginary, dimensions in his photographs, especially when he – as he often does – shows the young men sleeping, or only the empty screen, the video projector or the worn out chairs, thus presenting the porno cinema as a place for all possible desires and projections. Artist, born 1973, lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig. |
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