Armin Linke

Armin Linke was born in 1966 and began working as a photographer in 1986. At the beginning of his career he created portraits of poets, actors, artists, celebrities and other interesting faces. He often collaborates with the fashion industry, creating the campaign for Ter et Bantine, and has published fashion photos in several magazines including Purple, ID, Dazed&Confused. However, Linke is not truly interested in fashion photography, and he often considers it as a quick way to make money in order to carryout his own projects. After the mid 90’s, Linke began slowly moving away from taking portraits to landscape projects with the same obsession that had already distinguished his way of working.
Since hearing about the construction in China of the Three Gorges Dam in 1998, he has been developing a project on the landscapes and huge construction sites of the world – urban development and engineering constructions. This is a very large, chilling, alien project. In the last five years Linke has traveled around the world after his subjects, with the precision of a scientist, or better of a killer. The result of such confrontation with these vast technical colossus, semi-divine-icons, mega projects are sincere and direct portraits.
The urban conglomerats of global cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America fascinate Linke, so that he often takes stills of towns while they are actually being created. Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Moscow are just a few of the cities he has photographed.
Linke gives us a chance to take part in the visions of those places, no matter how sad, mysterious, or frightening. What he registers with his photographs is the construction of a world that projects into our future but is part of our present.

Linke is traveling restlessly through Germany, Switzerland, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, Congo, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Kazakhistan, Russia and the Arctic. The view of these landscapes and architectural structures presented through his images are sometimes so impressive that one could wonder whether these have been digitally altered. Some of the pictures at first can look like the fabrication of a pseudo pop sci-fi vision, artificial and inorganic, but they are simply the reflection of our world and ultimately are a frank reproduction of reality.

Extracts from this production have been published in several magazines including, Flash Art, Pruple, Vogue Italia, ID, and Dazed&Confused.

In 1993, Linke started to create his own archive that presents more than 50,000 images from his collaboration with young international artists, the fashion industry, as well as images of architecture, portraits and landscapes. 10,000 of these images are available online (www.arminlinke.com) for a new project entitled “Book on Demand.” Any viewer, anywhere, can choose 20 images and have a unique book printed for them. The cost of this unique book is around 30 USD + shipping. Linke has been participated in several solo shows and has taken part in the traveling exhibition “Cities on the Move” (1998, 1999), Berlin Biennale (1998), Architecture Biennale in Venice (2000), Valencia Biennale (2001), Sao Paulo Biennale (2002), Venice Biennale (2003) and many other important exhibitions in prestigious museums around the world.

He has already produced several monographic project books including: Instant book 1/2/3, 1048 and 4Flight, published and distributed by www.artecontemporanea.com. He is currently working on a general book of his recent work published by Skira.