City TV (Berlin) #99/8 Possibly 1997 - 2009

Frank Thiel made this photograph, sometime around the turn of the millennium in Berlin. It’s a study in contrasts, right? Stone versus sky, geometric versus fluid, captured in that quiet, grey light. Looking at this makes me think about how Thiel, like any artist, makes choices that frame the world in a particular way. The texture of the stone is really present, you can see every little nick and mark – time is revealed in those imperfections. Notice how the column, with its elaborate swirls, juts skyward to meet the figures perched above? It creates this tension that makes you want to keep looking and looking. Thiel's work reminds me a little of Bernd and Hilla Becher, those photographers who obsessively documented industrial structures. But Thiel brings a certain poetry to his images, a feeling that the city is alive, in flux, full of stories, and it's not just some dead object.