On the potential of futile endeavours. Peter Piller has always enjoyed photographing birds. Sometimes, when the bird had already taken flight from the photographer, good photographs happened.

The German artist Peter Piller (*1968) works in photos, drawings, and conceptually, and also teaches at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) in Leipzig as a professor of photography.

Piller’s conceptual artistic work is characterized by the assembling and categorizing of image material. The artist creates archives through organizing collected images – hence, for instance, photographs from newspapers, company events, libraries, or the Internet – according to his own criteria and makes them into groups of works. He thus produces references between the found image material and opens up new possible interpretations by means of the compilation and the interplay between word and image. The collections of images created over the years are arranged anew again and again and published in the series Archiv Peter Piller.

In his own photographic work, the artist’s gaze focuses on day-to-day life. In his series Peripheriewanderung (Periphery Walks), he has been exploring the borders of settlements in various places in Europe photographically for nearly twenty years. Back in the studio, the photographs are supplemented with memory drawings and therefore give rise to mental maps.