We must look like citified dandies to them

European Month of Photography – eyes on

In striking photographic cycles, the artist Lena Lapschina explores global cities, often focusing on aspects of urban planning, publicly accessible spaces, the programmatic definition of identities, and the distinctive flair of suburban areas and downtowns.
Lapschina, who uses a wide range of cameras, shies away neither from the city’s bright façades nor from its dark sides. For her monumental series 1000mm/or The Bedroom Window, she captured the world—more precisely, the world of Simmering, a structure in the eastern part of contemporary Vienna—through a hyper-telephoto lens with a focal length of one meter. A documentary of contemporary life in which we can read the conversion of rural into urban space: the culmination of a transformative process under the guise of a “banlieue”.
The aesthetic shots of altered or effaced advertisement boards that appear in the series Communication draw the viewer’s attention to exemplary street furniture and the attractive design of the environments in which we live.
With meticulous precision, the artist also detects and uncovers what lies “behind” and “beneath,” what is supposedly invisible, and puts it into the frame it deserves. Of particular interest in this connection is Lapschina’s Urban Archaeology series, for which she invited injured handbags and attaché briefcases, lost lingerie and other personal effects to the city’s outer social margin for a rough on-location shoot.