Erwin Polanc, Oliver Klimpel — Evening Standards

For his most recent project, Evening Standards, Erwin Polanc spent twelve weeks in London, where he approached various urban communities and their stories through portrait photography and the documentation of urban situations. In particular, Polanc sought to capture the specificity of this contemporary moment and its aesthetic and emotional sensations, namely the post-Brexit atmosphere, and to depict characters who either did not experience the optimism of the New Labour years, have left it behind or only know it from history books. On the streets of Bow, Mile End and Aldgate East, different rhythms and speeds of life come together, reflecting a conglomerate of start-ups, speculation and urban development as well as the diversity of the city itself.

The title of the project is taken from the London evening newspaper The Evening Standard, which was founded in 1827and renamed the London Evening Standard in 2009 following its takeover by Russian oligarch Alexander Yevgenyevich Lebedev, and has since been a free, advertising-funded vessel for big city gossip, business news and real estate ads.

In the context of the artist’s book, the title breaks down into its two components, as it poses the question of what norms and standards can be agreed upon in this digital melancholy, where only camera lenses and microchips capture times of waning light and information from a very specific London milieu. Polanc’s photographs show a meticulousness of imaging that thematizes seeing itself and its perception, while at the same time paying homage to London and its working-class districts that are in danger of disappearing.

Together with Oliver Klimpel, with whom he developed the artist book in close collaboration and who prepared a text using headlines from the London Evening Standard, Polanc will talk about the book’s creation in a presentation at HALLE FÜRKUNST Steiermark.

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