The internationally successful and visually impaired photo artist from Hanover shows the bizarreness and hidden beauty of our cities.
Guido Klumpe’s work moves between street and abstract architectural photography. The photographer composes his images in urban spaces and in such a minimalist way that they puzzle the viewer.“

URBANITY
He uses what cityscapes have to offer: Shapes, surfaces, colors, reflections, light and shadow. To achieve this, the photographer is on the move a lot, especially in bright sunshine. These lighting situations are particularly interesting for him, as this is how he creates his bright colors and strong contrasts.
He is particularly attracted to districts that are characterized by functional architecture: Train stations, shopping centers, gas stations and the like. Places where most people either only spend a short time to do something or just pass through. Guido Klumpe elicits a special aesthetic, beauty and poetry from them.
In the city, he is surrounded by situations and scenarios that he turns into photographic art. He discovers them in the banal and extracts them from the chaos of the urban environment. “Art is everywhere,” he says. Once he has discovered a place with potential, the process of working it out begins for him. He looks for what is not immediately obvious, what contains a story or a riddle. He explores ways of combining different levels, putting elements together and creating something new. “For me, the city is a kind of Legoland.” The photographer works with a Fuji X-T5 and constantly changing focal lengths.

MINIMALISM
For Klumpe, minimalism is not an aesthetic end in itself, but fundamental. He reduces his images to the essentials in order to guide the viewer through angles and directions as well as image planes and to confuse him in places, because the photographer wants to question the way we see with his image design. He is interested in the moment of transition, in which the three-dimensional architecture is abstracted into the two-dimensional by reducing the optical reference points. He uses perspective and point of view to photographically compose the building levels
photographically: “I stage with photographic means. I’m like a kind of set designer who turns passers-by into protagonists,” he says.
This minimalist abstraction sometimes seems somewhat enigmatic and has a background: Klumpe has been severely visually impaired since birth. He is blind in his left eye and only has 25 percent vision in his right eye.
He lacks spatial vision and his nerves only transmit a small amount of information. This results in a kind of data compression, which makes his vision flat and lacking in detail.
However, his brain has learned to translate the two-dimensional information into a three-dimensional concept of the world: “I live in a simulated three-dimensionality, so to speak. I process this experience of puzzlement in my work and make it accessible to the viewer with my abstract architectural photographs.”

URBAN MINIMALISM – MINIMALIST URBANITY

It is not surprising that he is inspired by photographers such as Saul Leiter and George Byrne as well as painters such as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper. Guido Klumpe’s work straddles the border between photography and painting. “Some days I feel less like a photographer and more like an abstract painter who thinks about how he can relate colors and shapes.”