Photographer Frank Hülsbömer is often called a perfectionist and praised for his meticulously staged images. Indeed their level of technical perfection makes many of them look like computer renderings, and some look like apparatus in physics experiments. Yet there is always a subtle humor at work, which keeps them from feeling dry. Take the two lamps in the tennis speed of light playing tennis with their reflections, the series Sexual peeling where a strip of paper is photographed in the various stages of peeling off a wall, and note how the use of cheap, everyday materials contrasts with their elaborate, straight-laced depiction. Hülsbömer’s works have been referred to as “still lives”, but the term doesn’t sit well. Inanimate as the subjects may be, they seem to breathe and move. Instead of looking immaculately arranged, they convey the impression of having been captured at exactly the right moment, when everything falls into place, just so.
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