With a foundation in photography and a degree in Product Design from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Northwestern Switzerland, photographer Fabin Oefner learned early that the creative process – regardless of the medium – is a multi-layered and complex balancing act of multiple factors. Along the way, he also found that his true passion was combining these factors into exploring and experimenting with visualizing time and the invisible effects of the natural sciences in ways that are impossible to the human eye.
More recently, Oefner combined his passion for product design and photography into a suite of images of high-performance cars that appear to have been blown apart. According to Oefner, the series “explores essential questions abut the relationship of time and reality, ultimately creating a visually rich rendition of a moment that never existed.”
Although the images may appear to be doctored compositions of exploded view renderings, Oefner in fact painstakingly photographed thousands of individual car parts with the aid of needles and string before finally combining the thousands of resulting photos into a single composition in post-production:
“What you see in these images, is a moment that never existed in real life,” says Oefner. “What looks like a car falling apart is, in fact, a moment in time that has been created artificially by blending over 2000 individual images together. There is a unique pleasure about artificially building a moment… Freezing a moment in time is stupefying.”
The Series:
Auto Union Type C (1936-1937)
Maserati 250F (1957)
Ford GT40 (1969)
Bugatti 57 SC (1934-1940)
Porsche 956 (1982)
“These are possibly the ‘slowest high-speed’ images ever captured,” adds Oefner. “It took almost two months to create an image that looks as if it was captured in a fraction of a second. The whole disassembly in itself took more than a day for each car due to the complexity of the models. But that’s a bit of a boy thing. There’s an enjoyment in the analysis, discovering something by taking it apart, like peeling an onion.”
The series is currently on display at the M.A.D. Gallery in Dubai.
