For Matthias Urban, retreat and withdrawal always make important components in the risky act of taking a picture. Risky in a sense of the willingness to bear potential friction between mental sketch and the photograph as the actual sum of mindful processing, adjustments, measurements, motor actions all in all. The wondrous and sometimes straining voyage from imagination to image is a rocky one at times. A photographer is to keep focus and courage for taking the risk.

Matthias Urban was willing to do so. And out of this, a five years lasting journey’s conclusion »At Dawn the Locust Grabs His Clothes« emerged. It is a tranquil meditation about encounters, changes, insights, glimpses, a deeply intimate story being shared. It radiates a peculiar and sudden focus amongst its soothing preposterousness, an unexpected and abrupt step out of vague impressions the meaning of withdrawal sometimes carries within.

Creating an almost alluring invitation to a journey full of photographic absurdities, you are being invited to shoulder the tripod, look through Matthias Urban’s lens, and see for yourself what his chosen frame of focus has to offer. Looking for sensations in the ordinary requires a curious focus after all. It proposes to observe weird wonders the world has to offer which might evade your gaze, at least in the eventual context.

As I am standing in the dust of our sought out hiding place, I observe Matthias from another point of view, in his very own moments of creating the otherwise inexistent. I see the old furniture around us, cracky walls, uninhabited cobwebs. And yet I know that those very same impressions I took in will differ from his. Also a point of view. A profound one. I have seen it before: How he in his photographic compositions subtly changes scenery without having changed it at all at the same time.

The book’s humorous quirkiness helps greatly as hold-on scenery amidst its dreamlike states and passages you could lose yourself in. Dreams tend to do that, at least in my experience. Sometimes, you know only afterwards what your mind was pondering about. Another time, you have no choice but to remain ignorant of it. You just realize its whole weirdness without being exactly sure what it was about.

Matthias Urban plays with this very same state of sense. I am captivated by its effect on me when I once again look at one of his pictures and ask myself if it is really true what I am seeing. He credibly transports dream’s loss of awareness into present awakeness, and interchanges features instinctively without them being distinctive. A deeply subconscious layer which resonates almost as one of the book’s basic laws, so to speak.

It really is the context that counts, and Matthias Urban gently pushes the object over its boundaries. He shifts its purpose or embedding into the world by simply photographing it in peculiar notion, inwards and outwards. Giving birth to a new context altogether. Random artificial mechanisms and remnants that pose as motifs get exchanged for something that now feels like a being bearing life.

And where there is life, there is a story.

By Lisa Gallhammer