Alexander Binder

Alexander Binder, based in Stuttgart, was born in 1976 in Germany's Black Forest region. He is a self-taught photographer with no formal artistic training. Viewing creation through antique lenses, self-made lenses, prisms and optical toys, he invites the viewer on a psychedelic journey into a universe full of contrasts: colour photographs clash with dense black-and-white works, where life and death, beauty and ugliness confront each other.
Kristall ohne Liebe (literally translated as “Crystal without Love”) is a visual journey into a mystical and dreamlike parallel world.
Attracted by the occult and mysticism, his references are the visionary world of science fiction, fantasy novels, Lovecraftian horror, conspiracy theories and underground comics.
In his work, he likes to play with the well-known and accepted idea that photography is a means of documenting the world, a faithful mirror of reality. The use of this tool to capture invisible and magical planes creates confusion, but also helps to question our perception of the ‘real world’. The screen that separates us from the depths.
The forests and wilderness filled with invisible and dark telluric forces as spaces of the subconscious where the boundary between the environment and the self vanishes is what he wants to show in his images.
For him, photographs are sigils, graphic symbols used in magic as the signature of a spiritual entity. In modern usage, especially in the context of chaos magic, which has followers such as writers Robert Anton Wilson and Allan Moore and the musicians of Die Antwoord, sigils refer to a symbolic representation of the magician's desired outcome.
According to the author, he always hated the clean aesthetics and perfect results of standard lenses. His personal vision of photography led him to pinhole photography, using cheap plastic cameras and old Soviet lenses. His favourite photographic lenses consist only of a small hole in a piece of metallic paper attached to a cover plate.
The designs of his self-built cameras are not really elaborate and seem rather amateurish, full of small, slow features of old cameras loaded with expired colour or black and white film.
An aesthetic practice that shuns pixels and modern digital sensors.