Thomas Wrede: Manhattan/Picture Worlds

German photographer Thomas Wrede (born 1963) has been fascinated by the billboards of Manhattan as a photographic motif. Focusing in on details framed by passersby and street life, he thus creates cityscapes that transform the city into a stage set on which the larger-than-life ideals of the advertising industry merge imperceptibly with the realism of the street and the reality of life. As in earlier series of photographs, so in this one Wrede’s formal interest is in shifts in the relative size of things and in the generation of different levels of reality. Snapshots of multilayered situations combine to create a classic collage, a real collage that exists only for that split second in which the shutter is depressed and only when glimpsed from the camera’s own angle.