Robert Pufleb’s TRANSFORMER begins with a simple urban fixture: the floodlight on its post, the kind that bathes roadsides and lots in a sodium glare. Working across China, France, Germany and Latvia, Pufleb found these lamps in Chongqing and other cities, and through an optical shifting technique removed the supporting columns from view while leaving the lighting modules untouched. The result is a vantage point that cannot exist in physical space—luminous discs and rectangles suspended against night sky, estranged from the infrastructure that holds them up. The photographs were made between 2015 and 2018 and gathered here as the essence of a three-year project.
The book’s title carries a double edge. It names the electrical apparatus that steps voltage up or down, and it names the act of becoming something else. Pufleb’s saucers invite the first reading and then withhold it: what looks like a craft is a municipal lamp, and what looks like documentation is a study in perception. The sequence draws on a widespread cultural memory of UFO sightings, a memory the publisher’s account anchors in a 2017 New York Times report on Pentagon spending on secret investigations. Pufleb had already been photographing these lights before that news broke. The coincidence is not the subject; it is the atmosphere.
Eriskay Connection issued the book in 2018 as an exposed Sussex-bound hardcover, 172 pages, 24 by 32 centimetres, with design by Nadine Schlieper and Carel Fransen. The format gives the night images scale without strain. Texts include a conversation on transformation with Gregor Jansen, director of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and Mischa Kuball of the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, alongside Pufleb’s own writing; Tobias Chriske and Sanja Methner edited the texts.
For a collector, the book’s interest lies in how deliberately it separates looking from knowing. The photographs are not tricks, and they are not quite documents either. They hold a fixed subject at an impossible angle and let the ordinary become strange again. The conversation with Jansen and Kuball extends that tension into language, which is why the volume reads as a considered project rather than a portfolio of effects.
