Marten Lange - Ghost Witness

M to rten Lange
Ghost Witness

Published by Loose Joints, 2020
Size: 23.3 x 34 cm
Softcover
168 Pages
ISBN 978-1-912719-20-4

China has a rich tradition of ghost stories and supernatural beliefs. There are stories of ghosts that can change shape, or transform into air, pure darkness, or light. In Ghost Witness, Mårten Lange tells the story of a country hurtling toward the future with the past following silently behind, like a specter in the smog.

During his time in China, Lange visited urban metropolises that have expanded rapidly in recent years, driven by hyper-accelerated growth and development. Traveling through these megacities, Lange explores the vanguard between streamlined urban planning and disordered everyday life. Ghost Witness focuses on the unique quality of light in the urban environment, where sunlight filters through polluted air and vast arrays of LEDs twinkle in the rain—revealing the world indirectly, like a mirror.

The images in Ghost Witness inhabit and reproduce the grid's machine-like rational logic to interrogate the overlaps and fissures between architecture, technology, surveillance, and the future. Lange's precise photographs often depict these fissures: indecipherable codes, shattered windowpanes, decay, and entropy in the order of glass and steel. Suspended in a liminal state between constant construction and expansion, Lange questions what it means for humanity to inhabit planned, designed, and repeated environments, with little recourse for history, transition, and change.