These wry photographs, with their delight in the absurd, are a prime example of an anthropology of everyday and popular culture inviting the reader to reflect on cultural and social differences, vernacular culture, and man’s horror of the void.
Almost everything can manifest itself in the center of a roundabout, endowing this non-place with a meaning that we only casually glimpse while driving by: advertisements for local businesses, historical allegories, artworks, craft, monuments of ruling ideologies and religions—as though man could not abide a void. For years, Andreas Züst, the late photographer, meteorologist, publisher, collector, and patron of the arts, took photographs of roundabouts in Europe and Asia. He started in 1990 in Switzerland. From 1997 to 1999 various journeys to India, England and France completed the collection. At the time of his premature death in 2000, Züst was preparing the publication of this book.