Fotograf Magazine

“All photography is a kind of transformation.

If you want to do it or if you don’t want to do it, it is.“ Jörg Sasse

Jörg Sasse studied photography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy) in the years 1982 to 1987. He was a master’s student in the studio of Bernhard and Hilla Becher, which gave rise to the prominent Dusseldorf School of Photography. Sasse’s early series Still Life (Stilleben, 1983–1985) captures various arranged still lifes, both puny and absurd, a theme that he further developed by exploring the details of the everyday designs discovered in the series Shop Windows (Schaufenster, 1983 till the present), Private Spaces (Private Räume, 1983 till the present) and Public Spaces (Öffentliche Gebäude, 1991–1995). While his Düsseldorf schoolmates further pursued Becher‘s subject of combining banal detail with monumentality, Sasse’s focus shifted towards normativity and in his 1980s series he began to catalogue all that he himself calls Alltäglichkeit, which can translated as Everydayness or Commonness. The details of interiors, public spaces and shop windows bring to focus temporality and transiency both of the marginal cultural imprints as well as photography as such. This interest of Sasse’s, only in a different form, turned him into a zealous collector: he would buy out whole photo archives, from a variety of sources, for later use and categorization. And that is how the transformation and categorization of archives became the basis for all his work that followed.