TOPOPHILIA

Traveling 20,000 miles across Europe's countless towns and villages, this series captures an unsettling view of the constructed environment. Unassuming at first, these photographs subtly twist our ideas of perception and expectation of the surrounding.

(The images were taken all across Europe)

This project is about poetry of space, found in rural regions all over of the European continent. Peter worked in most of its countries and traveled from village to village, more than 20,000 miles in total. There are no people in the photographs, yet immanent in all of them is a sense of human presence. The series contains 70 selected photographs from all over Europe, the submission contains 16 images from Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

The work is also related to Arthur Danto´s idea of art as "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace" (Harvard University Press, 1981). Peter has chosen common small town spaces away from traffic routes as the motifs for his work. He puts the focus not only on their material, but also on their immaterial quality. 'Topophilia' serves as an example for Danto´s ideas that art makes obvious things odd, art defamiliarizes and artworks have immaterial as well as material constituents.