"Honestly, I don't really have any idea what documentary photography is," says Tobias Zielony in an interview. Nevertheless, it is precisely the terse, descriptive style that makes his images so fascinating. Images that come across like snapshots yet are staged. Tobias Zielony is today one of the most discussed German photographers of the younger generation. His series of images deal with young people and their everyday lives, their fashion, their hanging out, and their social life in the strangely inhospitable urban interstices where the youth have settled. Places where they meet and showcase themselves, which they "must fill with gestures and clothes."
"Car Park", "Curfew", "Chemnitz", "Gas Station", "Big Sexyland" or "Vele" are the titles of Zielony's photo series. The project "Jenny, Jenny ..." (2011-2013), photographed in Berlin and which includes two photographic animation films, deals with young women, some of whom earn their money through sex work. "But the realities and roles are fluid," it says in the exhibition announcement of the Berlinische Galerie, where this project was first shown in 2013. The artist is very aware of his own role. The question, "which poses are invoked when a photographer appears", is one that Zielony always considers. In "Jenny Jenny", he says in an interview, "it is also about desire and the production of desire. Of course, I am also an actor in this game: How do the women present themselves, how do they want to be seen. Zielony's subjective photography undermines traditional documentary strategies.
He finds his motifs in situations where people are together. Sometimes it’s just looks, postures, gestures, looking away. There is smoking and talking, watching or kissing, posting and sniffing. The questions of adults are different. Parking garages and building entrances, urban wastelands and street corners are the favorite places of the youth. Zielony has found them in Newport, Halle and Marseille, in Naples, Los Angeles, Bristol and Winnipeg, the capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba. But it could just as well have been somewhere else. Because of what these intense images also deal with, a certain interchangeability is inscribed in them – even if the accessories and codes sometimes vary. Cultural differences are hardly discernible in the youth of our globalized world.
However, one can look even closer. In this context, the short texts that the artist writes for some of his series are an important part. "They do not tell the individual stories of the people in the photographs and do not try, to interpret the images art-theoretically," says Zielony. Rather, it is about providing additional information about the political and economic situation of the places. He emphasizes that he is not a sociologist. "What interests me, however, is how the phenomenon of standing around, of doing nothing, can be incorporated into political and economic structures." The series "Curfew" (curfew), for example, finds its personnel in the twilight. After 9 PM, the police in Bristol imposed a curfew on some young people; signs of a changed security policy: "The youth are no longer defined as endangered but are themselves becoming dangerous subjects." This political and socially critical dimension is always reflected in Zielony's images.
During his studies in documentary photography in Newport, Wales, Zielony learned the rules and visual journalistic strategies of classical reportage photography. But he wanted to go further. The decision to study in Leipzig afterwards was also a decision against working as a photojournalist and for the art context. His images are more than just social reportage. After studying in the photography class of Timm Rautert at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Zielony moved to Berlin. Here, his first major exhibitions could be seen. Even his early photographs dealt with youth in the suburbs. At the same time, they also addressed the places themselves, the Knowle West neighborhood in Bristol, the prefabricated housing estate of Halle-Neustadt, or the Quartiers Nords in Marseille. Living spaces that are no longer imbued with any urban utopia and have become a kind of "autonomous city within the city."
What happens when institutional and social structures collapse and people are pushed to the margins and left to fend for themselves? What do the descendants of Canadian Indigenous peoples in the reserves of Manitoba do, whose traditions and future perspectives have been destroyed (Manitoba, 2009)? Or the youth of a former industrial town in the California desert, when the only employment for the residents consists of numbing themselves with crystal meth (Trona, 2008)?
The places Zielony visits are not the locations of a privileged cultural creator. Rather, his images testify to a deep empathy for the protagonists of life. Especially for those who stand on the margins. A question that is often asked is how it is possible to get so close to the young people in their world. It is surely the gift and art of Tobias Zielony to gain trust while remaining an observer.
