“I honestly don’t really know what documentary photography is,” Tobias Zielony says in an interview. Nevertheless it is precisely his succinct descriptive style that makes his photographs so fascinating: Pictures that look like snapshots and yet are staged.

Tobias Zielony, born in Wuppertal, Germany in 1973 is today one of the most talked-about German artists of the younger generation. His photographic series address young people and their daily life, their fashion, their hanging out, and their social life in the oddly inhospitable urban spaces that the juveniles have made their own. Places where they meet and present themselves, places they “have to fill with gestures and things.”

Zielony’s photographic series are called Car Park, Curfew, Chemnitz, Tankstelle, Big Sexyland, and Vele. The project he worked on in Berlin from 2011 to 2013, Jenny, Jenny, includes two photo-animations and has to do with young women, some of whom earn their money as sex workers. Yet the realities and roles are in flux, announces the exhibition invitation of the Berlinische Galerie, where this project was first shown in 2013.

The artist is very conscious of his own role in all of this. Zielony always asks himself “which poses do the subjects draw on when a photographer appears?” In “Jenny, Jenny, however” he explained in an interview, “it is also about desire and producing desire. Of course I am an actor in this game too: How do the women present themselves, how do they want to be seen?”
The subjective photography of Zielony undermines traditional documentary strategies. He finds his motifs in situations in which people come together.

Sometimes it’s just glances, postures, gestures, looking away. It’s smoking and talking, looking and necking, posing and sniffing. The questions adults ask are different. Parking garages and doorways, empty lots and street corners are the most popular places for the young people. Zielony found them in Newport, Halle, Marseille, Naples, Los Angeles, Bristol, and Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba, Canada. But it could have been anywhere else as well. For whatever these intense images are about, they are in a certain way interchangeable—even if the accessories and codes sometimes vary. There are hardly any perceptible cultural differences in the youth of our globalized world.

We can take a closer look, however. The short texts, with which the artist supplements some of his series, are an important element. “They do not tell the individual stories of the people in the photographs, nor do they attempt to interpret the imagery in terms of art theory,” says Zielony. It is more about supplying additional information on the political and economic situation of the places. He is not a sociologist, Zielony emphasizes. “I am very interested, however, in how the phenomenon of standing around, of doing nothing can be incorporated in political and economic structures.”

The series Curfew, for example, finds its actors at twilight. The Bristol police set a curfew of 9 pm for the kids; signs of a changed security policy: “The adolescents are no longer defined as endangered, but become themselves dangerous subjects.” This political and socially critical dimension Zielony always depicts in his photographs as well.

While studying documentary photography in Newport, Wales Zielony learned the rules and photojournalistic strategies of classical reportage photography. But he wanted to go beyond that. The decision to continue studying in Leipzig was also a decision against working as a photo journalist and for the art context. His photographs are now more social reportage.

After studying photography under Timm Rautert at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) in Leipzig, Zielony was drawn to Berlin. Here he presented his first larger exhibitions. Even his early photographs addressed youth in the suburbs. At the same time they dealt with the places themselves, the Knowle West neighborhood in Bristol, the prefab-housing estate in Halle-Neustadt, and the quartiers nord of Marseille: habitats that are no longer animated by an urban Utopia and have become a type of “autonomous city in the city.”

What happens when institutional and social structures disintegrate and people are pushed to the periphery, left to fend for themselves? What do the descendants of Canada’s indigenous peoples do in Manitoba’s reserves, whose traditions and future perspectives were destroyed (Manitoba, 2009)? Or the young people in a former industrial city in California’s desert, where the inhabitants’ only occupation is to numb themselves with crystal meth (Trona, 2008)?

The places that Zielony visits are not the locations of privileged creative artists. Instead his photographs demonstrate a deep empathy for the protagonists of life. Especially for those standing around on the periphery.
He is often asked how he is able to get so close to the young people and their world. It is must be the talent and art of Tobias Zielony to gain their trust and at the same time remain observer.