ON PLEASURE GROUNDS
ON PLEASURE GROUNDS
CREDITS
Photographer Clemens Ascher (b.1983, Austria) has created a strange and slightly sinister amusement park, satirically naming the series On Pleasure Grounds. It is a fictional world where the people, guzzling synthetically coloured drinks and scarfing down junk food seem to be the spectacle themselves. Their excessiveness is all the more apparent in contrast to the stripped environment.
With wide spaces and blue skies, Ascher seems to create the illusion of space and freedom, yet their world is closed off by walls. The people seem content in the limited environment, fascinated by and subsisting on all things artificial.
The few wild animals are strange and exotic in this barren world, but in spite of this, the people in the park don’t give them any attention, and instead amuse themselves by taking photographs with missiles and rockets. In this mix of walled compounds, air missiles, placated families, toxic junk food and misplaced animals… perhaps it’s a place not far away from where we find ourselves today?
