Swimmers, bathers – illustrations from vacation- and wellness-advertisement catalogues are the raw material for the current photo work of Thomas Zika. The series with the title ‘bathers’ of the photographer enclose 24 parts. When humans meet the element water, this is multilateral occupied in our culture history: Water is necessary for surviving. It offers the possibility for the body hygiene and relaxation, at the same time is it since thousands of years an incalculable, over-powerful enemy. Zika, born 1963 in Haan, Germany, concerns itself in its photographs with all these components. Likewise he ties to the art-historical tradition of the motive of the bathing, which of antic mosaics, over which Ingress, Cézannes reaches works up to the pin UP photography. The artist sees the tourism industry falling back our time to this culture history and would like to sharp the perception of a viewer for these connections. Because, so Zika: “My photographic-artistic interest lies in reflecting the conditions of our reality perception. I believe that nowadays the sense of seeing lies in thinking about this perception form.”

Landscape doesn’t come into existence, until man turns towards nature without a practical purpose, only by free-floating enjoying view. That means landscape could only originate, as modern man succeeded in emancipating from nature by perceiving it consciously as an opposite one. Thus having gained new freedom it became possible to make a new turn towards nature by creating a consciously controlled coherence between man and nature. Landscape always was the product of a cultural process.

Within my photographic project entitled “Hierogamos” (hierogamos: Greek: the sacred marriage of heaven and earth, of god with his creation) firstly I want to make a homage to Francesco PetrarcaÂ’s delivered description of nature. Ecstatic enthusiasm inaugurated by immediate sensual perception of landscape is flanked by the threatened feeling from an alienated view of an unideal landscape. My photography wants to oscillate two states of perception: landscape as man’s possible possession – and landscape as the thing never to possess.