Roland Fischer

Roland Fischer - Camino

Roland Fischer (Munich, 1958) has dedicated his artistic career to photography, working in series in which he portrays both people and architectural forms. From the very beginning his chief interest has resided in portraits, a genre in which he has sought to render plastic abstraction and to stamp a conceptual halo on his representational motifs, thus opening photography up to different perspectives.
In 1996 Fischer began his well-known series Cathedrals, revealing his personal way of portraying some of the most venerated temples of Europe. In such works he resorts to similar points of view as those appearing in his portraits of faces, thereby provoking a reflection on the meaning of the architecture, enabling us to enter into plays on transparency.
The artist’s ongoing Cathedrals series is the point of departure of this project, in which Fischer for the first time presents architectural portraits of emblematic buildings linked to the Road to Santiago, alongside a large-format group portrait resembling his earlier images of students or soldiers. Such works always portray people sharing motivations, goals or tastes. On this occasion the photograph reveals close-up views of one thousand pilgrims who voluntarily took part in the project upon arriving in Compostela.