Peter Piller works on reinterpretation and depiction of modern documentary photographs and archive images previously published in other contexts (regional newspapers, internet…). He classifies and rearranges its as mural installations and artist’s books. With a careful observation and a subtle humor, Peter Piller, through this method, questions the images and the media’s potential. He examines possibilities and limits of photography in relation to conceptual art. From 1994 to 2005, Peter Piller earned his living as the head for documentation in an important media agency in Hambourg, in charge with daily analyzing and archiving 150 regional newspapers. This activity established the material for the “Archiv Peter Piller“, an artistic collection of newspaper’s photographs classified on subjective typologies giving a feed back on our information culture and its visual archetypes.

Interested in truly insignificant photos, Peter Piller explores this “genre” in the local press and uses it to build up an archive with no hierarchical, alphabetical or thematic organization. The titles are usually subjective and/or ambiguous (consultable at http://www.peterpiller.de/). He slowly enlarges this corpus by adding new, highly disparate groups—for example, a selection from the photo archives of the insurance company La Bâloise that the CPG showed during the 50JPGphoto festival in 2010. At Piller’s 2014 CPG retrospective, held in partnership with the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the emphasis was on war-related images. In the spirit of the CPG’s curatorial practice of showing the same piece in different exhibitions and contexts, the 2011-2012 series Umschläge (Covers)will be seen this time in its book form. It pairs images meant to be viewed at different moments—the front and back covers of the military photo magazine Armeerundschau. Published in the former East Germany, its front cover always featured soldiers with their military gear, and the back cover, a young and sometimes coquettish woman.