Stefan Bogner x Jan Karl Baedeker

The alpine landscapes that Stefan Bogner creates in his photography have little to do with the lush fields of flowers and sun-drenched ski slopes in traditional travel brochures of the tourism and marketing industry. With their brown, arid meadows and vegetation, patchy snowfields, cliffs covered in moss and lichen, faded strips of asphalt, seas of fog and wisps of clouds – again and again, wisps of clouds – rather, his motifs and image construction follow the ideal of the Romantics, who in the 19th century discovered the Alps as an otherworldly gateway between man (small, finite) and the di- vine universe (large, infinite). The greatness – or sublime as English exhibition catalogues call the quality of Caspar David Friedrich’s work – of these mighty, rugged rock masses and formations, shaped by the movement of the continents over millions of years and un- tamed by mankind, blows like a cold wind on the back of the neck when looking at Bogner’s mountain worlds.