Fabian Oefner creates destruction. Beautiful, high-res mechanical destruction in large-format prints. ‘Disintegrating II’ is the mechanical artist’s second of his Disintegrating Series of high performance sports cars caught in mid-explosion. We see frames and engines frozen in the act of shattering, bursting from hoods in a lethal spray of shiny metallic shrapnel in midnight black backgrounds.
But Oefner didn’t actually blow up a 1957 Maserati 250F or 1934 Bugatti 57 SC for the sake of his art. The sleek images on display at the M.A.D Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland weren’t computer-generated either. Instead, Oefner meticulously deconstructs scale models of the classic vehicles – models with thousands of parts. Then he creates sketches of where each part, including the tiniest of screws, would go if it had been let loose with explosive fury. And finally, he painstakingly shoots each individual part, fastened in its appropriate place in space with fine needles and bits of string. Checkout the video capturing his painstaking process below to see for yourself.
Each image takes him as much as two months and some 2,000 individual photographs which are then captured in a single photo.
Oefner explains that his approach is different than the conventional photographer’s goal of capturing a moment. His work, he says, is “all about inventing a moment in time.”