ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Worldwide, millions of animals are killed each year for the fur trade in order to process their skins into coats, jackets or caps. For one fur coat, 30 to 50 raccoons or 14 lynxes, 40 to 60 minks, twelve wolves, 110 squirrels or 130 to 200 chinchillas die. Fur animals are kept in cages and thus deprived of any possibility to behave in a species-appropriate manner. On fur farms, not even the minimum requirements, that these animals make to their environment, are fulfilled. In many countries fur-bearing wild animals are still hunted or caught with traps in the wild.

AUTHOR
Josef Dreisörner (born 1967)
Living in Munich, Germany

Digital post-editing today allows repairing virtually every mistake and achieving any desired aesthetic result, but at a great cost. Where any result can be produced from any original image, seeing and sensual perception lose their value and significance, as does the technical and manual process of capturing an image. Josef Dreisörner rejects this current approach to the photographic workflow radically.

His KLIMSCH UNIKAT portrait shots yield perspectives of the human visage with downright surgical precision – an aesthetic approach which may feel alien at first, but is intentional in its expressiveness. Although still committed to high aesthetic standards, in most Josef Dreisörner’s still lifes do not focus on aesthetic issues. Rather, it is his concern as an artist to draw the viewer‘s attention to socially relevant themes. The choice of this subject must indeed be considered as unusual. The fact that the viewer initially reacts in a disturbed manner is a matter of calculation. Only a longer engagement with the work reveals on the one hand the theme that moves the artist, on the other hand it deliberately leaves room for interpretation and should invite further discussion.

Such pictorial statements are mainly realised by so-called large format cameras. Of particular note is the Klimsch Praktika reproduction / process camera built in 1957 with a film format of up to 50×60 cm (20×24 Inch). Photographs are taken analogously on film or with direct exposure on black-and-white positive photo paper. When using the positive photo paper the captured image cannot be reproduced in analog photographic technology, and there is no option of analogue or digital post-processing. The captures on film are realized by means of the Palladium /Platinum Print process.

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