EVERYTHING SO DEMOCRATIC AND COOL

Familiar faces, anonymous portraits, abandoned landscapes, animals and urban spaces—EVERYTHING SO DEMOCRATIC AND COOL designed by Matthias Last’s Studio Last sketches an associative collage of our collective present. The images selected for the retrospective of Christian Werner’s photographic work are drawn from various series and contexts: shots from fashion shoots, commissions for magazines and private portraits, as well as personal projects. They reveal the variety of Werner’s work, and the vision of a gaze that is at once intimate and reserved.

“In Christian Werner’s photography, the subject is always simultaneously in both the present moment and the past. They tell us about a turning point in our civilization. Space, time, youth, natural resources; everything seems to abound in these pictures. However Christian Werner’s special visual language already anticipates the end; his photographs are also always looking backwards.”
– Felix Stephan, Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Christian Werner’s pictures always have attitude. A mixture of nonchalance, serendipity and attentiveness.”
– Ijoma Mangold, Die ZEIT

“Behind each of his photographs is a clear, sharp idea. They are among the most exciting that contemporary German photography has to offer. His new book EVERYTHING SO DEMOCRATIC AND COOL shows that Christian Werner has mastered the almost impossible trio of rigour, humor, and poetry.”
– Adriano Sack, Welt am Sonntag

“Christian Werner’s art always strikes an aesthetic nerve. His latest photo book shows a piece of sensitive pop-cultural history.”
– Silke Hohmann, Monopol

“You almost have the impression that you’re holding a personal photo album. One that represents the span of the last decade.”
– Kevin Hanschke, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

“The feeling that Christian Werner captures in his photography is something that has not yet been adequately defined—a feeling without a name, whose magical attraction draws the viewer all the more into its spell.”
– Hanno Hauenstein, Berliner Zeitung

Christian Werner lives and works in Berlin. In addition to his work for many national and international magazines, he focuses on long-term projects from which several books have already emerged. Christian Werner previously dealt, among other things, with the disappearance of the former Federal Republic of Germany (Stillleben BRD, Kerber Verlag 2016) and the urban flora (Die Blüten einer Stadt, Suhrkamp 2018). In 2019 his book Los Angeles was published by Korbinian Verlag.

EVERYTHING SO DEMOCRATIC AND COOL

Publisher: Blake & Vargas
Design: Studio Last
Print: Full color offset print
Workmanship: soft cover
Volume: 200 pages
Format: 32 × 24 cm
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The posters were explicitly made for Christian Werner’s photo exhibition in Berlin in September 2020.