Vanity of Object: Tom Vack - Design Photography
08 Nov 2014 - 25 Jan 2015
VANITY OF OBJECT: TOM VACK - DESIGN PHOTOGRAPHY
8 November 2014 - 25 January 2015
The oeuvre of Tom Vack not only reads like a Who’s Who of the international design scene since the 1980s but also reflects its globalisation today.
Creating enigmas and telling stories, imagination and nostalgia, the processual and the playful, deconstruction and a new historicism – postmodernism revolutionised not just architecture but also design and its pictorial strategies. The Alchimia studio, the Memphis group and their success created the need for a new language of photography, conveying a new concept of design and portraying the products borne from it in the process.
The photographer Tom Vack (*1948 Chicago), whose path has led him from the United States to Italy, France and Germany, played a decisive role in these new forms of expression and communication. Tom Vack conveyed the work of renowned designers – like Michele De Lucchi, Philippe Starck or Ingo Maurer – in photographs, which were mostly taken for journals or manufacturers’ catalogues.
Tom Vack’s creative beginnings fall under the golden age of postmodernism. He allowed factors such as naiveté and subconscious memories to be his guide, and he experiments with cinematic effects and strong effects of light and shade. ’I wanted to make an object in a picture rather than a picture of an object’ is his creative mindset. Vack has left the credo of classical object and product photography and creates expressive, atmospherically dense compositions that give a sense of their stories – subjective, dramatic, poetic.
An exhibition of Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich – in collaboration with Tom Vack.
Exhibition designer: Arch. Ester Pirotta. Lighting Consultant: Hagen Sczech.
Supported by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
8 November 2014 - 25 January 2015
The oeuvre of Tom Vack not only reads like a Who’s Who of the international design scene since the 1980s but also reflects its globalisation today.
Creating enigmas and telling stories, imagination and nostalgia, the processual and the playful, deconstruction and a new historicism – postmodernism revolutionised not just architecture but also design and its pictorial strategies. The Alchimia studio, the Memphis group and their success created the need for a new language of photography, conveying a new concept of design and portraying the products borne from it in the process.
The photographer Tom Vack (*1948 Chicago), whose path has led him from the United States to Italy, France and Germany, played a decisive role in these new forms of expression and communication. Tom Vack conveyed the work of renowned designers – like Michele De Lucchi, Philippe Starck or Ingo Maurer – in photographs, which were mostly taken for journals or manufacturers’ catalogues.
Tom Vack’s creative beginnings fall under the golden age of postmodernism. He allowed factors such as naiveté and subconscious memories to be his guide, and he experiments with cinematic effects and strong effects of light and shade. ’I wanted to make an object in a picture rather than a picture of an object’ is his creative mindset. Vack has left the credo of classical object and product photography and creates expressive, atmospherically dense compositions that give a sense of their stories – subjective, dramatic, poetic.
An exhibition of Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich – in collaboration with Tom Vack.
Exhibition designer: Arch. Ester Pirotta. Lighting Consultant: Hagen Sczech.
Supported by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.