The Great Unreal

Taiyo Onorato, Nico Krebs

A residency grant from the City of Zurich brought us to New York City in the summer of 2005. Everything was loud and exciting, but also quickly became narrow and only met a small part of the America of our imagination. The tradition of American Landscape Photography and the cultural punctum of the Road Trip was always an important reference while we were studying. Soon we were drawn out to the streets towards the west.

On our first journey across the country, we were perplexed and photographically overstrained. Everything seemed fascinating, the vast horizons, the repetition in the patterns of consumerist architecture, the endless beauty of the nature and the sheer size of all things, uncomparable to anything we had seen before. Still, making pictures seemed very difficult. The simultaneity of the new discovery and the feeling of having seen everything already, in movies, photographs, books, narrations, was too confusing. Slowly we found ways of dealing with this confusion. We developed the idea of taking this grand imagery and twist it around and build up on it. By creating props and tools on the way, we were able to interfere in the moment of exposure itself, to manipulate, but still remain in the time and space restriction of the photographic medium.

In Fall of 2006 we started a second journey, this time with clearer concepts and expectations. We began to create large collections of pictures and the examination of the country and its culture became more extensive. Also on this journey, intuition and coincidence remained an important guidance. After having shown the works in three shows (PS1 in New York, Rencontres d’Arles and Wartesaal in Zurich), we decided to make a third trip in the winter of 2008. This time we stayed in a small town in Northern California and photographed new images. At the same time we also began to make collage-like reproductions and deconstructed photographs taken on the previous journeys.

After 3 years, we began to form sequences of constructed and ‚straight’ images and the boarders of the imagined and the real oddly blurred. The disparate parts started to come together to form our own vision of the America we had seen and felt.

Taiyo Onorato (b. 1979 in Zurich) and Nico Krebs (b. 1979 in Winterthur) studied photography at the School of Art and Design in Zurich (HGKZ) and have worked together since 2003. They live in Zurich and Berlin.

Numerous solo and group exhibitions: The Casting, Suzie Q project space, Zurich (2009); The Whole Shebang, Swiss Institute, New York (2008); Factoiden, Wartesaal Perla, Zurich (2007); Twilight Switch, P.S.1 MoMA, New York (2006); Getflat, Fokus Switzerland, EGO Gallery, Barcelona (2005); The Language of Humour, SOGA Gallery, Bratislava (2008); Journées photographiques de Bienne, Biel / Bienne (2008); ART Bingo, Atelier Leimbach, Zurich (2008); Watermill Benefit, New York (2008); New York Studio Grant of the city of Zurich (2005).