For years, Stefan Banz created photographs and videos about his seemingly unspectacular family life. His ambiguously charged images record his children growing up, his wife, and their petty-bourgeois environment in Lucerne, Switzerland. He claims to construct images “of those moments when coincidence and keenness of the eye coalesce to reveal the mystery of reality in its strange abundance of possible meanings.” He photographs blue-and-white plastic deck chairs and closed parasols at night, a little rag doll hanging on a brass door handle, a white fur-trimmed baby overall on white bathroom tiles, the neighbour’s little boy lying around naked on the ground, surrounded by garden hoses.
These images and their peculiarly voyeuristic, yet intimate gestures discreetly point to an abyss lurking in the idyll of the family garden where the incomprehensible runs its course.
