Heaven is a place on earth

Size: 20 x 13 cm, 90 pages
First edition: 30 + 5
Price on request
Photography: Alexander Lipsius
Created: 2012

“A cold, shiny eagle against a sky, blurred by scratches. The eagle sits, throne-like, in the shade, on a tall erect flagpole, high above the city, framed by a black background, which, like a black box, enlaces the following apocalyptic series of images. This narrow, but captivating book resembles a harrowing film sequence about an infernal New York, almost devoid of human presence.
The title ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ breaks this mood in an ironic way as the images have no association with Belinda Carlisle’s 1980s hit of the same name. It rather counters the song’s love message and turns it into an eerie vision of an urban place close to the abyss. Even at daytime it feels as if the night’s veil is still present—abandoned Moloch rather than lively metropolis. As it reads in one of the photographs, ‘The flu takes the same train as you’… Only six images, framed with a white border, seem, for a moment, to halt this depressing vision. Although upon close inspection, even here a strange feeling of lifelessness creeps in: bereft of any radiance, the nearly monochrome scenes feel frozen and surreal.
Cryptic, finely composed, memorable—a photo-cinematic narrative like a stroll in the Hades of big-city America. The more one confronts Alexander Lipsius’s unsettling series of images, the more details emerge: a photographic contamination where each frame counts.“
Boris Hars-Tschachotin