Toystory. Work in progress

One day it happens. The doll and the toy car lose their significance – the little person grows up. An artistic phase, in which children create their own living spaces, thus ends for good. Children's rooms as a mirror of the child's imaginary world, as an area where imagination crystalizes against the conformity of the adult-world, from which there are nevertheless traces to be found. Bertram Kober photographs children's rooms and searches for answers to many questions that the topic brings up. The work on this project is like a trip though time to the photographer's own past. ... Kobers photographs are – as much as photography can be – authentic. Nothing was moved or changed. Depending on the extract, the everyday life of children is concentrated into symbolic, partially surreal-seeming scenes full of poetry, childish naïveté and the budding adaptation to the life of adults. They are little stages, on which Shakira meets the Barbie horse and the collected Smurfs share a shelf with menacing monsters made of plastic. A world, that apparently coexists peacefully in front of and simultaneously behind the magic mirror of Wonderland until the protagonists end up at the flea market or in boxes in the attic.

Anna Gripp
Excerpt from: Bertram Kober Toystory In: PHOTONEWS 6. 2006. Page 21

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