Tausendfüßler
Volker Renner’s new artist’s book Tausendfüßler is a visual exploration of voluntary collective exertion. For the project, the artist photographed runners along a marathon course. Rather than focusing on victory poses, cheering spectators, sweat-soaked bodies, or faces contorted by pain, Renner directs his attention solely to what propels them forward: the feet. Isolated and stripped of all unnecessary context, headless pairs of legs appear in motion. Across the pages, a visual staccato of running shoes and high-performance textiles in bright neon colors flickers past the viewer’s eye—never quite reaching the finish line.
Renner presents the marathon not as an individual athletic accomplishment, but as the social effort of a single collective body that has lost its way in motion. Aesthetically, the project echoes the concept of the “ornament of the mass,” described by Siegfried Kracauer in 1927. The sociologist identified in the synchronized movements and visual patterns of crowds a reflection of contemporary systems of production. In this sense, Tausendfüßler is more than a photographic study of sport. It is an inquiry into endurance and exploitation, individuality and collectivity—and a wry response to the question of how much of the human remains when one is reduced to the essential: the next step.