Roland Nachtigäller
From the book Supervisions
2005

Digitalization has led to a profound change in terms of both the nature and the application of photography: In addition to having dissolved the genre boundaries and an almost unlimited availability everywhere in daily life, today the photographic image also has a dramatically changed relationship to the surrounding reality.

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Stephan Berg
From the book Supervisions
2005

In a world where everything has been surveyed and the last blank areas have been mapped, the notion of the discoverer and adventurer who sets off for icy polar regions never seen before and dreams of deserts and mountain peaks where nobody has ever set foot no longer makes any sense, and in a way it is strangely anachronistic. Yet this is the context in which I would rank Andreas Gefeller. Like all important discoverers before him, he, too, is an explorer who is not content with a simple dis-covery but is intent on placing it within a system, and yet he is primarily motivated by the longing to show us images previously unseen which are capable of changing our relation to reality and thus possibly reality itself. (Read more)

Roland Nachtigäller
From the print magazine artist kunstmagazin
2007

In die Bilder von Andreas Gefeller steigt man auf bemerkenswerte Weise sofort ein. Die unmittelbare Präsenz, die von ihnen ausgeht, ist nur zu einem geringen Teil dem Großformat und der Brillanz des Diasec-Verfahrens zuzuschreiben. Vielmehr zeichnet Gefeller ein feines Gespür für die stille Sensation im Banalen und die versteckte Poesie in Räumen und Landschaften aus. Es ist nicht nur das Geheimnisvolle vieler seiner Aufnahmen, der Strukturen und Kompositionen, das sich tief in das Gedächtnis gräbt, sondern auch die unvermuteten Brüche und logischen Widersprüche in den Bildern selbst. Und angesichts einer Arbeit wie z. B. ohne Titel (Parkhaus)1 von 2002 ist es wichtig, gleich von Anfang an klarzustellen: Wir sprechen hier über einen Fotokünstler, nicht über einen Maler! (Read more)

Roland Nachtigäller
From the book Andreas Gefeller—Photographs
2009

Time and duration have always played an important role in Andreas Gefeller’s photography projects. His first major series Halbwertszeiten (Half-lives, 1996), whose German title even bears a temporal aspect, documented Gefeller’s “expedition” to the Chernobyl disaster area, ten years after the nuclear meltdown. The stoppage of time in this series is primarily seen in the pictorial motifs—when under an often bright, “irradiating” blue sky, snow-covered urban landscapes, sports facilities, or an amusement park seem frozen beyond the winter temperatures, while the few, occasionally portrayed people steadfastly assert forward development. Considering the nearly incomprehensible durations of radioactive half-lives, Andreas Gefeller found a reliable and credible photographic expression for the devastating relativization of time, in view of a nuclear catastrophe. (Read more)

Martin Hochleitner
From the book Andreas Gefeller—Photographs
2009

Mid-nineteenth century: PHOTOGRAPHIE NADAR—the French photographer’s name is emblazoned in large type across the basket of a balloon floating high above Paris. Nadar himself stands in the basket, pointing his camera at the metropolis. The wind whips the top hat from his head. Fixated as he is on the view through his lens, the photographer seems in danger of plummeting to earth at any moment. (Read more)

Ernest W. Uthemann
From the book Andreas Gefeller—Photographs
2009

A roughly 1.7-meter-tall person, observed from a distance of five meters and viewed between thumb and index finger held in front of the eye, appears to be only about two centimeters tall. A ginkgo leaf, considered from a two-meter distance and viewed in this same way, measures just a few millimeters. The fallen leaves in Andreas Gefeller’s photograph Laub (Leaves) (2007) look like a cluster of stars thousands of light years away. In like manner, Baumschule (Tree Nursery) (2005) calls to mind a negative reversal of a nighttime sky, and the scraps of paper in Berlin, 9. 7. 2006 (2006) resemble an accumulation of confetti. (Read more)

W.M. Hunt
From the book Photography Discussed
2010

We all look at hundreds of thousands of photographic images. Curators, dealer and editors working in the photography world undoubtedly look at even more. The hope is always that there will be something fresh, the thing we have never seen. As Diane Arbus said, “My favorite thing is to go where I have never been.” It is rare to encounter a new talent with a compelling vision. It is like venturing into the future and returning with this report: Andreas Gefeller. (Read more)