
What if they were unicorns – Adolf Hitler. 2016
“What if they were unicorns” are portraits of cruel inhuman and despotic leaders of our world history. We see human dictators, tyrants, genocidaires, traitors, and warriors, who played a decisive role in the course of history as crying, sad and innocent children.
The unicorn is regarded as the noblest of all beings in the fantasy world and embodies the good and the pure. The pictures thus raise the question: What if …? What if these historical despots would have been good men? How would have gone history? Would others have taken their place? What if these egomaniac, domineering dictators had not found the breeding ground for their uprising in society? And what has mankind learned from their murders and wars? What if…?

Dry tears #2. 2018
Water – resource, livelihood, common good, scarce and polluted.
Children lose their childhood and their chance for education. Going on day marches to provide their families with the essential water, because the wells in front of their villages now belong to the enterprises, the rivers where they live are dead and poisoned, the springs at their homes run dry because the water irrigates large plantations and monocultures and the seas on their beaches are full of plastic.

Faster, harder, louder #8. 2017
As a photographer for the fashion and advertising industry, digital image manipulation is part of everyday life. Bodies are prettified to the point of impossibility, shapes are changed, and illusions are created. The work is of such a high-quality that the manipulations can hardly be unmasked. Consumers and the industry are eager to find ever more extreme standards, the door to a world that is even more beautiful, slimmer and fatter – faster, harder, louder – gets opened by force.
And yet this is the picture language and methodology that is also the basis of our free artistic work, but the intention is different. It is not the deception of the observer, but rather the training of consciousness for what is possible. Excessive proportions, proliferations that would not be possible in real life, overperfection and the extinction of physical and biological laws, reveal the seemingly perfect phenomena as a fake, show that photography has long since renounced its role as an imaging medium of reality and truth.
Note: The text above was written by the Artist. No modification was made by C.O.C.A.
Germany
In 2004 Frank Bayh and Steff Ochs join together to form the photographers duo Frank & Steff. In their studio in Stuttgart they serve customers from advertising, fashion and corporate communications, but from the beginning free artistic projects play a major role in the work of the duo. The work of Frank & Steff has already been displayed in many parts of the world and has been rewarded with a number of international awards and prizes. It is the aesthetics and working techniques of fashion and beauty photography that is also found in most of their free and artistic pictures, but nevertheless these pictures have more than just a pleasing and decorative look. A closer look reveals an argument with political, contemporary or sociocritical topics.