The Barrack (2008) | Photography

 The Barrack (2008)

This 35mm photographic series documents an abandoned military barracks in Cologne, focusing on the remnants of its former domestic spaces. Stripped of their interiors, the bedrooms are reduced to bare walls, exposed structures, and metal mattress springs – the traces of a place once organised around rest, routine, and occupation.

Shot in black and white, the photographs transform these remnants into ambiguous landscapes. The exposed mattress frames, particularly when set against roofless rooms and open skies, begin to resemble oversized beds or skeletal domestic forms. The images hover between architecture and abstraction, suggesting both the intimacy of sleeping quarters and the institutional structures that once contained them.

The series considers the afterlife of military architecture: what remains when its function disappears, and how spaces designed for discipline and collective living can become strangely intimate, exposed, and vulnerable.