Michael Köster on Fstoppers

Michael Köster (*1960 in Berlin), has been involved in photography since the mid-1980s.

Köster's formal language reveals influences of New Objectivity photography as well as those of Film Noir. But associations with painting also arise when viewing some of the staged images, whose atmosphere is reminiscent of the enigmatic mood of inanimate and stillness in Pittura Metafisica paintings.

Köster's motifs seem to lead a life of their own. They confront us in a mixture of strangeness, distance, and intimacy that is as enigmatic as it is haunting. We, the viewers of the paintings, enter a visionary space, beyond our everyday experiences.

Michael Köster's images are not only irritating in that they reveal a different reality in relation to our everyday experience and perception of urbanity.
They fascinate, but they also - par excellence - raise questions, for example on topics such as identity and anonymity or urbanity and urban society.

André Lindhorst, January 2022