Lara Ziörjen (1994) is an artist and freelance photographer based in Zurich, Switzerland. She will graduate in summer 2021 from the Bachelor Photography at ECAL. Using photography as a tool, she tries to ask the values and hierarchies of things.
Through photography she explores themes such as materialism, globalization and class society. She is interested in how people talk, how they interact, how they are dressed, what surrounds them. She is an observer, her visual world depicts bodies, portraits, colours, shapes, objects and food. To zoom into the details of ob- jects is her everyday practice. Often it is more exciting to see something in detail than to look at the whole picture. To be as close as possible to the subject, to try to analyze and understand it. Combining images opens up a new dimension of photography for her.
About Too much of everything – words by Lara Ziörjen:
This book is a personal look at the contemporary world and which shows our consumerism in western socie- ty. Through these moments, a powerful vision of our culture emerges – who we are, what is important to us and where we are ultimately going. We live with abundance of things. Every day we see so many unknown things that we wonder what they are. Our food seems to become more and more artificial, objects more and more like strange things and our relationships more and more distant.
The importance of this book is the work of combination and the work of detail. To approach an object, to analyze it and to understand it. It is about the absurdity and banality in everyday life. For me the photo combinations open an infinite number of new possibilities of colours, shapes and meanings. Combining everyday observations and beauty in the madness of the world. The images were all taken with a mobile phone, an object I consider myself to be the consumer object that I use every day. Thus the process of photographing becomes itself part of the concept. The project was realised at ECAL.