The danger and the saving power of Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand’s photography has often been understood by critics as questioning the causality of the medium, through an emphasis on personal artistic intentionality. Yet to focus on Demand’s production technique overlooks the fact that in his images, the world is not seen to be entirely under his control. By questioning at the boundaries of human and technological power, Demand gestures towards the historical construct which Heidegger called ‘the essence of technology’, the tendency in contemporary thought to believe that beings can be understood only insofar as they relate to humanity and our needs. Demand’s work ironizes this mindset, within which we experience the world as merely a picture, and thereby begins to suggest that other ways of being may be possible.