image by
Tobias Zielony
Story/ No Story
In Tobias Zielony´s Story/ No Story there is a long dialog between the photographer and another guy. The two are talking about movies, and globalization, medial representation, jogging dresses, ritualized gestures and youth culture. The dialog is very long.
Zielony photographed youths all over the world. He depicts a global youth culture, name it: Los Angeles or Halle-Neustadt, it doesn’t matter. Globalization means here: outfits and gestures.
Of course there are huge cultural differences, and naturally it does matter what kind of homes those kids go back to, but Zielonys story is not about that.
The kids are there. Hanging around at all kinds of places, as youth do, as they do everywhere, they even do it at the posh and boring little suburb I am living in.
Zielony shows us something that we do recognize. The contact is established, we start to get closer, observing what we see.
Pictures like movie stills: grainy, at times somewhat blurry, the colors of the night.
Parking lots and bus stations, empty buildings, cars and roofs. Everyday moments, everyday kids, everyday scenery. Nothing is happening. A certain mood of melancholy is in the air.
Zielony managed to transfer the language of an imaginary European movie to photography. Here the language is new.
The everyday in Zielonys world is of a drab beauty, beautiful only because meant to be beautiful by the photographer. Tobias Zielony describes the youths here as being tough and fragile in the same time, he is turning them into the stars of an imaginary movie.
Being a youth means being in limbo.
Which road to go, what shall we do?
Because of the layout of Zielony s book, scans were hard to make. The photographs are sometimes slightly cropped and not as good as I would them like to be. Sorry for that.
