Fairytales
is a work about the mystery and myth of the largest country in the
world. Treading the line between poignant realism and humorous fantasy,
Frank Herfort's project Fairy Tale of Russia is a mesmerising,
thought-provoking and at times chilling collection of photographs from
his journey through Russia. Surreal imagery, colours and scenes lead on
to candid shots of post-soviet aesthetic in an honest and strikingly
human sequence of photos. German photographer Frank Herfort has spent
over a decade photographing the insides and outsides of spaces
throughout the East. His style is influenced by social realism: people
are shown in their everyday life, which seems to be made up by banal
details. His large-format artworks are hence an artistic combination of
the surreal and the straight-lined, with an irony detectable in the
pictorial language. Herfort's work brings a modern twist, seemingly
imported from the outside, that eradicates markers of time or context
and persuades the viewer to create their own narrative.
The images
make a surreal, absurd impression; they raise more questions than they
answer. Each image in this series stands alone and tell its own story,
but together they seem to tell a whole fairytale.
Text in English, French, and German.