My older brother Christian has, for as long as I can remember, been interested in model railways. As a child we would often visit conferences, swaps and other model trains events. To be hones model railways were never of particular interest to me but when suddenly on my journey between studio and house I noticed just such a railway being constructed behind milked out windows, I instantly became curious!

Over the next few months as the model moved towards its completion I visited the model on a weekly basis photographing the model, the space it occupied, the constructors and their progress. The confines of this exercise became very important to me; the tight space in which the model was being built, the large slow and cumbersome large format camera I as working with, the constantly moving workers, the multiple layers and representations of reality within the space, model and image material scattered around, the weekly rhythm. Confining myself to taking only one or two images on each visit, as the project developed these interrelationships and constraints began to play a more important role than the narrative of the image subject brining a form of self-reflectivity to the images.

This show at Nest, Netherlands Architecture Institute was curated by Saskia van Stein.

Download Flyer Oberseving Construction in PDF.