Fred Froehlich

••• SET, Page 01

Photo Project, 2000-2013, Work in Progress
SET

The long term project "SET" is based on visual samples taken from urban and remote areas globally. My photographic memory conditioned through contemporary culture, serves as a search modus. Records of found objects and spatial constellations develop. The pictures contain indications of human actions and barely permit conclusions on their geographical origin. The process of taking photos is familiar with methods of contemporary archaeology, which are focussed on sociological questions about human society and about how the people who used the artifacts lived. According to principles of cinematic narration I recombine image sequences with the intention to draw the picture of a fictious and a real place at the same time.

SET0033876, SET0038749

••• SET, Page 02

"What is the right distance from which to view a city?Too near, and the intimate contact of closeness distorts it with a deceptive familiarity. Too far, however, and it is seen with indifference. It is necessary to adopt the exact point of view. For Fred Froehlich, the places of memory in urban spaces are found in the traces and remains that human beings have left behind. Places that are absent of this photographic account and representative of waste, of manufactured objects, bottles, boxes, old electrical appliances as well as strange scrawls, signs and patterns that cover walls and roads. Images gathered with the passion of the botanist of the sidewalk.

Ironically, his previous work in Industrial Design has enabled him to focus on contemporary products that have become out of date, despite their pretension to technological modernity. Abandoned like the ruins of a civilization that awaits its rescue and interpretation, the photograph brings a new deathliness, petrifying everything that comes under its gaze, literally a fossilized fragment. The artist is therefore like an archaeologist who carefully observes the symptoms, from which he makes a story, the story of what is possible. Images that are fragments of a lost tale that looks like it has been constructed using the Morrelli method, designed to uncover falsifications in the artwork, similar to psychoanalytical methods that look beyond the general impression in order to focus on the importance of secondary details, the insignificant peculiarities that pass unnoticed by the sightseer and lover of panoramas and stereotypes, images already rendered and loaded with desire. The artist, however, focuses on particulars that are considered marginal, almost trivial, but hold the key that provides access to the imaginary urban space. These photographs are revealing moments, one could say, that have escaped attention and therefore belong to the unconscious of the city."

Text: Mercedes Replinger (Translation: Anna Usborne)
from "Una ciudad sin acontecimientos" (A city where nothing happens), On the occasion of the exhibition "SET 01", Madrid 2006