Garden gnome and canopy swing. Leaf blower and wire mesh fence. Water cooler gossip, and prams always in the way. Techno after midnight and piles of rubbish on the balcony that reek. Neighbourhoods have many faces, both beautiful and ugly. Okay, we usually can’t pick our neighbours. But who else will water the flowers or feed the fish when we’re on holiday, who will accept our parcel deliveries, who will help out when we need a cup of sugar, who will lend us an ear when we’re in need? Here’s to the neighbourhood!
This photo, like the design on the cover of the magazine, comes from the Agfa advertising department’s archive at the Museum Ludwig. It’s a collection rife with paradoxes, of staged and idealised models posting for professional photographers as though the snapshots were being taken candidly by amateurs. Artist Fiona Tan confronts these relics from the colourful world of 1960s advertising, and its concept of gender roles at the time. In so doing, she reveals the artifice of these photos, as well as the contrast between ideal and reality.
Rüdiger Müller