Drawing upon his background in sculpture, Thomas Demand used paper to build a re-creation of the hotel room where the controversial American writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard lived and worked in 1972 and 1973. He used a photograph of the room as his source. After completing his model, Demand photographed it, creating an image that mimics the original, but that is also full of artifice. The even studio lighting, the sharp creases in the white pillow in the foreground, and the lack of detail on objects in the room—like the numberless face of the alarm clock or the keyless typewriter—signal that this is not reality but a mock-up of it. This tension between reality and artifice raises questions about the trust we place in photographs as accurate, unmitigated records of events, times, and places. “It’s not about the real place,” Demand has said. “It’s much more about what we have seen as the real place.”
Thomas Demand Room (Zimmer) 1996
- Medium
- Chromogenic print
- Dimensions
- 67 3/4 × 7' 7 3/8" (172 × 232 cm)
- Credit
- Gift of the Nina W. Werblow Charitable Trust
- Object number
- 869.1996
- Copyright
- © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
- Department
- Photography
- Thomas Demand has 10 works online.
- There are 28,798 photographs online.
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