Marcus Bastel

A Narrative

Bastel's pictures have the quality of film stills, a paused moment in a story. How the story continues is a matter of our imagination. By gathering a number of his images together he invites the viewer to invent a storyline.
How do they connect?
These images were shot during a journey from Detroit to Los Angeles in April 2013. But there is more to them than the document of a journey, they reach deeper and create another reality. They create a sense of foreboding, with something unsuspected about to happen.

Being human we want to connect the dots, to make sense of things, and so we invent an explanation, a story.

Do the pictures portray what happened on the road or are they a fabrication of what might have been?
As with all photography it is a curated view, an exaggeration of reality courtesy of the photographer who picked, pointed and framed what we see in the end.

It comes as no surprise that Bastel writes fiction as well and might explain why his images often seem like fragments from stories. He has a need to invent a narrative in order to make sense of things, wanting to spin a yarn or tell a tale and make the fantastic out of the ordinary.

“I have visited and traveled through the US for the past 14 years and have tried to make sense of it every time. Yet even after all those trips the moment I hit the open road I drift from reality into some kind of movie world. Perhaps this is the way Americans perceive their country and through it the world, becoming fictitious characters in a movie set. Perhaps as movies aim to imitate reality, reality itself has come to imitate what we see in movies and the real within our reality is no longer.”

Marcus Bastel is a German photographer and writer. He studied Fine Art at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam and at Sheffield Hallam University.
His book ‘But where are all the people’ won Honorable Mention in the Photography Book Now International Juried Competition 2010.
He lives and works in London.
For further information or if you would like to buy a print please contact Marcus on
info@marcusbastel.com



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