The Harvest

The Harvest addresses the financial industry and its rather abstract methods to generate profit. Although action of the financial industry seems decoupled from a classic and simple view on economy - producing and selling something which satisfies a demand, the industry's conduct has a huge impact on society and the international economic fabric.

I worked on The Harvest in 2018/19, but the very beginning of the project goes further back, as it also reflects some of the impressions I gathered in the City of London when I lived in the UK in the late nineties: the financial industry was creating a unique and technoid kind of urban landscape there. The protagonists of this constructed world were hidden behind the sleek facades, which were acting like huge membranes, emitting their claim to power.

The task was now to find a kind of photographic language which could provide a look behind those membranes and would manage to visualize the abstract profit machinery and their navigators.

The term “peanuts” - used by a German banker to describe the “minor” amount of 50 million Deutsche Mark - came up my mind and I started to develop still life setups using objects like nuts, (rotten) fruit, standing for crooked deals, honey, symbolising the sweet profits, to depict the money-machines installed by bank companies. Other props used for the stills were mirrors - telling the story of an unreal doubling of money - and rather obvious: coins and notes. The encrypted, coded visual language resembled the obscure financial models, the candy color scheme was an invitation to the viewer to step into the narration.

Another component of “the harvest” are images of facades of bank headquarters and investments in property in Zurich, Munich and Frankfurt. These photographs are meant to transport the idea of the membranes of power.

To find visuals for the people behind the financial sector, I started a research into official press imagery depicting the big navigators of the industry. I found a consistent pattern in their hand gestures and decided to use this for my narration: I used heavy crops of the press photos and converted them to bitmap to add another level of abstraction. To complete the story, I then put this imagery into dialogue with the absurd stills and the more realistic urban landscape shots.

Jens Masmann is part of »Guest Room: Michael Famighetti«.

Check out his Artist Feature Ping Pong.