The greatest albums in music history in the spotlight – on turntables that became legendary in their own right.
worldrecords is a tribute to analogue acoustic art, a tribute to the warmest, perhaps most sensitive kind of sound carrier. In a certain way – and this is what makes the photo series so special – it is also a personal time machine for the viewer:
music as an impulse to remember parts of one’s own history, a triggering of earlier thoughts and feelings.
The soundtrack of one’s own life.
The approach, precise down to the last detail, finds its ideal expression in the large format. Every groove, every label reference, every tonearm part is oversized and therefore almost tangible. The special lighting that Kai has developed for worldrecords is a big part of making these effects real.
Diasec is a patented process that guarantees the fine art photographs for at least 100 years. The image is printed and then a thin layer of acrylic resin is applied, which does not affect the colors or the appearance of the paper.
Kai Schäfer on the origins of the WORLDRECORDS project:
“In 2007 I bought an apartment that was the first floor of an old villa dating back to 1851. It had huge walls and I wondered what image would fit into the room. Around the same time, a friend gave me a mixtape that meant a lot to him and asked if I could take a picture of it. That’s what I did, and after a few weeks, I thought I should try to photograph my favorite record on a record player.”
“I knew this would be technically harder than recording a mixtape because of the reflections in the vinyl, so I had to build a special lighting system. The result was the first of the WORLDRECORDS images. It wasn’t until years later, in 2010, when I realized that my friends really loved the picture, that I decided to take a whole series of these photos. This was the beginning of the WORLDRECORDS series.”
