ROLAND FISCHER

The photographic portraits by Roland Fischer (1958) are always part of a thematic series. In the series of Los Angeles Portraits (1989-1993), men’s and women’s faces of various ages come away from aquatic backgrounds marked by reflections of different types of blue. At first view, the images seem to be interesting for the exterior features of the characters, certain stereotypes. Notably due to the size of the photographs, the oddity of each protagonist, their particular presence can nevertheless be distinguished in the portraits. Certain details, like the title of the series, the swimming pool or the facial expressions invite the viewer to speculate on the exterior circumstances of the shots. For Fischer, his series constitute conceptual works of art, images maintaining an ambiguous relationship with their content, like the relationship between freedom and individual existence and the limits imposed by the exterior setting. Fischer is firstly interested in the “contrast between the surface with an almost mathematical character of the photograph and the natural shape of the human face.”