Conversation between Claudio Moser, Phillipp Kaiser and Lilian Pfaff

Phillipp Kaiser: How much does place permeate your pictures? Do all your pictures describe non-places?
Claudio Moser: Yes. I wouldn’t want viewers to be reminded of their honeymoon. The non-place has the great advantage that I lose my orientation, that a void opens up. Sometimes I intrude into areas where no particular aesthetic prevails and no particular purpose is visible—areas that maybe have never been put to use, or have been abandoned and not yet redefined.

Philipp Kaiser: One could also say that your work focuses on the periphery and thus to an extent can be read as a reflection on urbanism.
Claudio Moser: It is not intended to be but, of course, it can be read that way.

Philipp Kaiser: So you try to find the picturesque in the agglomeration?
Claudio Moser: Exactly. I don’t see why the picturesque should only be found in the hills of Tuscany.

Philipp Kaiser: Then what does that look like in Los Angeles? The non-place is after all a European projection. Here in Los Angeles it’s on every corner.
Claudio Moser: That’s what makes this city, or rather this extension of urbanity, so pleasant: this city is openly legible. This place does not impose anything on me, especially not the sublime. I don’t like places—or photographs, or people—that are so perfect that they exclude everything except for themselves.

Lilian Pfaff: Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about “place,” but about the banal and the everyday.
Claudio Moser: Yeah. Neither of them demands anything from me, …

Claudio Moser, nowhere near far enough, 2010 Hatje Cantz