The photobook Burning Down the House includes about 80 portraits of very differently operating graffiti writers. It consists of two different photographic portrait series.
For the first series Behrendt met the writers with an analog medium format camera and a precise concept, which included two important questions: 1. In which location should the portrait be created? and, 2. How would the writer like to reveal themself?
For the second series Behrendt photographed the writers with a Polaroid camera so that they were recognizable, and thus possibly identifiable, in the subway stations of Berlin. He then gave them back the Polaroid photo and asked their permission to use the image, so that it could be published. The resulting portraits testify in an illustrative way to the tense relationship between visibility and anonymity, between possible recognition and the accompanying possible identification by third parties, or, ultimately, even the police.
Finally, the book contains 76 interviews with the individual artists. It creates an intimate picture of the protagonists, which manifests itself in their answers to the questions of motivation, their own representation and their selected locations.
About the photographer
Norman Behrendt is a German photographer and graphic designer living and working in Berlin. He graduated from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, in 2013. His work Burning Down the House was part of ‘Truths, Facts, Fictions, Lies’, the main exhibition of PhotoIreland Festival 2014.
