Center Stage, 2019

Alexander Benz   Emerging artists

Alexander Benz is a Paris based photographer originally from Zurich, Switzerland. He studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City and later obtained a masters in art curating from the University of Stockholm, Sweden.

Alexander is currently woking on a personal project called "Myself in Others" where he take pictures of his surroundings at times when they resonate strongly with how he feels at that very moment in space and time. The images are instant recreations, filtered through his emotions, of spontaneous chance encounters that took place at that particular location just moments before. The trigger to his reaction might be a strange setting, an unusual movement or a partly hidden subject just before they make eye contact.

The square format, the clean and minimal environment and the subtraction of any colour puts the focus on the momentary, often slightly playful or unexpected story rather than the actual subject itself. One could think of the images as movie stills, freeze frames of his reflections on something that just happened, something perhaps even barely noticeable at first-- as those reflections play out on the screen of his imagination. To him those images are a way to contemplate the absurdity of his own life, how he selectively sees his surrounding, the people he encounters and himself in the midst of it all.