The series “By The Roadside”with its various parts is Michael Nguyen's most important field of work. Photosgraphs from Germany and neighboring countries
If we walk with our eyes open, we can see interesting, beautiful, and also ugly things along the road every day. And if we walk with not only with our eyes but also with our heart and mind open, you will discover a world that would otherwise remain closed to us. Sometimes spectacular. Sometimes ordinary but surprisingly miraculous. Michael Nguyen accompanies us on little journeys through places in Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, and elsewhere, to discover what the random walk leads us to.
“By the Roadside" consists several parts which are shown in the Portfolio section on Nguyen’s Website in the menufolder Photography.
This image is from the part: “ Calmness in Sight”
Michael Nguyen is a flâneur. In the ongoing part „Calmness in Sight“ which features work from 2018 on Michael Nguyen shows architectural objects and the little details around us taken in various cities. For him, architectural photography has exclusively an artistic function that interprets a building in a way that deliberately deviates from reality. Cityscapes, city views, individual architectural objects, architectural details, street furniture, street art, monuments, interior views are his topics. Many of this pictures primarily show outdoor shots of urban design at the intersection of architecture, urban planning and sociology.
Artistic photography today moves quite differently than it did a few decades ago as a visual force and communicative intervention. This is amid an overflowing stream of images whose production, administration, and dissemination have long since run out of control of conscientious management.
After film, television, computers, it is above all the smartphone that has catapulted us into a new visual age. Often, the challenge is to give the eyes an occasion to linger between their unsteady jumps from image to image. Michael Nguyen succeeds excellently in creating such an occasion with his photographs by creating clarity of vision and a challenge of interpretation through reduction and focus. In architecture, the term facade refers to the outwardly visible wall surfaces of a building, including windows, doors and the likes. Materials are often concrete, glass, wood, brick or masonry made of sand-lime bricks. But for Michael Nguyen, they are not just that inanimate materials or elements. They are like the face of a human, like the shape of body, or the clothes, which communicate with the other humans and tell stories.
That’s why in most of his photographs, Nguyen does not show an overall view of a building, but a look at the details and particularities. Just like when we approach a person and have a chance to look closer, we see their beautiful eyes, we hear their unique voice from those open lips, or sometimes just an interesting pattern of the dress they wear attracts us.
With these settings in mind, look at the photos of Nguyen. Buildings are not static objects with five facades, four side walls and the roof. They are lively, dynamic sculptures. The windows are their eyes, that reveal a part of their soul. The open doors are talking with us, inviting us to come in, to hear their inner stories. And the graphic layout of bricks, of glass, of wood or whatever the genuine architects create are their eye-catching clothes, which make our cities, our urban spaces more beautiful, more vibrant.
The photography shows the roof of the Tempodrom, a Berlin venue that was initially launched in 1980 as an alternative venue on the west side of Potsdamer Platz, in the immediate vicinity of what was then the Berlin Wall, in the form of a circus tent. The new Tempodrom building was constructed in 2001 according to designs by Doris Schäffler and Stephan SchĂĽtz of the architectural firm Gerkan, Marg and Partners. The 37-meter-high roof structure with its futuristic white forms is reminiscent of Oscar Niemeyer's BrasĂlia Cathedral. Visually, it is based on the shape of a circus tent.
