Fotograf Magazine

Endcommercial is a project by three artists who study and describe fragments of a city. Dr. Wolfgang Scheppe, a language philosopher, Florian Böhm, a former professional skateboarder and currently editor and graphic designer, and Luca Pizzaroni, a documentary filmmaker, have systematically depicted identical elements of New York City and other cities since 1997. The purpose of the project, whose archive currently contains 60,000 digital photographs (according to other sources there are now more than 100,000 images), was to matter-of-factly capture a vast amount of individual urban elements, join them together, compare them and show their uniformity. Street vendors, shop signs, close-ups of hydrants, the skeletons of bicycles chained to signposts, signs on lampposts – all these phenomena can be found in various towns and places with the same repetitiveness and terrifying uniformity. The works have been continuously posted on the Internet at www.endcommercial.com, but now a book has been released (Endcommercial/Reading the City) presenting the three artists’ works.